A History of Celibacy

A History of Celibacy

This is only for my personal use. This is nothing but excerpts from this book and not an article.  Don’t waste your time by reading it and then blame me.

Elizebath Abbott, A History of Celibacy, New York, Da Capo Pr 2001,

…St Augustine, always able to identify with libertine males, summarized the argument this way: “Remove prostitutes from human affairs, and you would pollute the world with lust.”  He and other influential moralists, religious and civil, have defended harlotry as an essential outlet for the randy males it  diverts from seducing the more suitable virgins they will later marry and with whom they will procreate….—p. 20 [prostitution]

…millions of Chinese bachelors condemned to celibate existences because the nations’ “one child per family” policy provoked mass destruction of unvalued female fetuses and infants and created today’s massive gender imbalance.—p. 20 [Chinese]

…Elsewhere, in India and Pakistan, men still voluntarily go under the knife to become hijras, entertainers who traditionally take vows of chastity, describe themselves as neither men or women, and live together in celibate communities.—p. 20 [eunuch] [In most cases they earn through prostitution and in few cases they even got married with another male—db]

…Much as I once revealed in sexual indulgence, I realized that at this stage of my life, I value even more the independence and serenity chaste solitude brings me. I welcome my freedom from the jealousy and possessiveness that characterized the most passionate of my relationships, and I am immensely and perpetually relieved that someone else’s domestic demands no longer dominate my daily agenda.—p. 22 [single]

…Socrates’ advice on the subject of how to treat unmarried women would have set them straight: set them to work like slaves, the wise man declared….—p. 28 [women]

…Plato commented, “No one should oppose Love, and to get on the wrong side of gods is to oppose Love.”[Plato, (trans. R. Waterfield), Symposium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 29-30]—p. 30 [love]

…Hippolytus shared the Amazon regard for chastity and disgust for female lust and raged:

O God, why hast Thou made this gleaming snare,

Woman, to dog us on the happy earth?

.         ..Woe upon you, woe!

How can I too much hate you, while the ill

Ye work upon the world grows deadlier still?

Too much? Make woman pure, and wild Love tame,

Or let me cry forever on their shame!—[Quotations from Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus are from the translation by Gilbert Murray, published in London by Geroge Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1931. Euripides, 4-5]p. 31[women, lust]  [But similar thought is common in India also, also blaming as the cause of lust—db]

…Love and lust were inextricably linked. The Greeks made no sharply honed distinctions between them and labelled them in one breath as love….—p. 32 [lust] {I wrote a poem with the same thought several years before: As they don’t know the real meaning; people will say that love and lust are different. But both are one and the same who lived their life after experiencing them both in life.—காமம் வேறென்பார்; காதல் வேறென்பார்; கருத்தறியாத காரணத்தால்.  காமமும், காதலும் ஒன்றேயாகும்; வகுத்தே பார்த்து வாழ்ந்தவருக்கு

…Women, Teiresias ruled, experience nine-tenths of the pleasure of sexual intercourse, leaving a mere 10 percent for their male partners….—p. 34 [women, sex] [Similar concept is here in India also about which there is even a story.  One king wanted to know who derive more pleasure in the act of sex, turned himself as a woman and enjoyed sex with a male. Then come back again as a man, he declared that woman actually enjoy more pleasure in the act of sex.—p. 34db.  Give reference.

…To a man eager to know when he should have sex with a woman, Pythagoras replied, “When you want to lose what strength you have.”[Plato, [Plato, (trans. R. Waterfield), Symposium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, Book I, 11]—p. 44  [sex]

…The only sex he (Pythagoras ) tolerated was for the express purpose of procreating children, and then only between husband and wife.—p. 44 [sex]

Centuries after Plato elaborated his concept of Ideas versus Matter, Christian theologians immersed in Platonic thought would laud him as a Christian before Christ was even born….—p. 44 [Plato, Greek]

THE ESSENES PREPARE FOR ARMAGEDDON

…The Essenes, priestly and messianic, claimed descent from Moses’ brother Aaron. They scrupulously obeyed the Law of Moses, observed the Sabbath and the religious calendar, and practiced ritual purity. They believed in the End of Days and the concept of the Chosen People. Here, however, they parted ways with other Jews. They saw themselves as “Israel that walks in the way of perfection,” “true Israel,” and so they excluded themselves from mainstream Jewry as the Chosen People. (Unlike the Pharisees and the second century B.C. Hasidim, self-named “the Congregation of the Pious,” the Essenes called themselves the Jewish people.—p. 45 [Essenes, Jews] {David Flusser, (trans. Carol Glucker), The Spiritual History of the Dead Sea Sect (Tel Aviv: MOD Books, 1989,11-13}

Essene life was austere and frugal. Twice daily, the priests prepared monotonous, one-course meals accompanied by bread, which the community consumed in utter silence. Flavius Josephus, who spent some time living with the Essenes, described their routine. After hours of work, they gathered together, donned white loincloths, and bathed in cold water. This ablution performed, they quietly sat down and awaited their repast. The baker brought them loaves of bread, and the cook added a single plate heaped with a single kind of food. The rule was that no one could taste anything until grace had been said, and so before and after they ate, they praised God for his bounty. Afterward, they shucked off their white garments and returned to work again until suppertime.—p. 45 [Essence, Jew] {Not like Essence, but when Brahmins take meal on special occasion, unless they all performed what is known as ‘parisheshanam’ taking water on the palm of the right hand, touching the leaves with the ring finger of the left hand, should pour water three times.  On religious occasions only authorized married woman, mostly the family head and not a widow should pour the water with a special spoon, preferably of silver or copper from another special vessel called ‘panchapatram or panchatram’.  Then they have to take seven small cooked rice and ate chanting the mantra for that.  Then again the woman will pour water now on the left hand which they will stretch and after pouring the water down on the side of the leaf, the leader of that occasion, again mostly elderly person, even he could be a widow, has to say ‘Harihi’.  Then alone all can began to eat.  Similarly at the end of the meal, the same woman will pour down water now on the right hand and the water will be again poured around the leaf.  Before that the leader has to see both sides to make sure all completed the meal.  Only after that water will be poured and still he will made sure that anyone is still eating.  Because even if one person was still eating others have to wait. And if anyone get up still others were eating, then rest of them all have to stop eating and that sin will fall upon that person who got up without permission.  In case of emergency, he will seek the permission of the leader and once he sanctioned, he can get up.—db}

The Essenes wore their clothes and their shoes till they disintegrated. They affected a rugged appearance and refrained from grooming themselves with (p.45) oil, as others did. They bathed ritually before each meal and after relieving themselves, an ablution they performed while modestly covering their nakedness with an apron. They defecated only at a distance from the settlement, digging a hole, covering themselves as they squatted, then burying the feces with earth. On the Sabbath, natural urges were forbidden.—pp. 45-46 [Essenes, Jew]

Ch 2 Early Christianity

…overeager young lovers, who in such a situation would have to resort to a tiny bag of pig’s blood to fake the marks of a torn hymen on the pristine linen sheet of their marriage bed….—p. 47  [sex] [To prove that the marriage was consummated.  I think this practice still followed among some Abrahamic traditions in India, particularly in Kashmir.  I think I read about it Sulman Rushdi’s book Midnight Children or some other book by him. —db]

…A few, including Origen, a third-century Church Father, interpreted Jesus’ words so literally that they castrated themselves.—p. 49 [Castration]

…Like the early Greek philosophers, most Church Fathers were bachelors and held similar, harsh views of any sexual activity, within or without marriage.  Even Tertullian, who was married, condemned sexuality as “illicit” and referred to women’s vaginas as the “Gateway to the Devil.”[E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (New York: Verso, 1991, 113]—p. 49 [sex, celibacy]

…They also pointed directly to Adam and Eve and concluded that, because they had been innocent virgins before the Fall, their (hence mankind’s) original sin must have been marriage and the sexuality it evoked.  Jerome encapsulated this in his usual indelicate fashion: “There is no greater calamity connected with [marital] captivity than to be the victim of another’s lust.”…[Jerome, Post Nicene Fathers, vol. 6 (Leiden: Fathers of the Church Press, 1991); also available on-line: http//ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers2.html) “Against Jovininan,” 386.—p. 53 [marriage, sex]

Early Christianity’s major thrust was its preoccupation with sexuality, and with virginity and celibacy in particular. The reverence for chastity was not new, recalling a legacy of asceticism, from Essene communalism to major Greek thinkers. In scholar Morton S. Eslin’s words, “Christianity did not make the world ascetic; rather the world in which Christianity found itself strove to make Christianity ascetic.”[Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976, 160]—p. 54 [ascetic, Christianity, celibacy]

…”How can you possibly think that you are freed from the Ruler of this age, when even his flies still crawl all over you?” [Peter Brown, “Bodies and Minds: Sexuality and Renunciation in Early Christianity,” in David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)” 482]demanded Tertullian. How could the struggling, insect-ridden Christian announce to the world that the Present Age was indeed over?

Something tangible was needed. Christian thinkers searching for a solution found it in the ascetic practices and philosophies around them and formulated their own notion of sexual renunciation. In a world where individuals seem- (p.54)ingly had little control over how their lives unfolded, the human body seemed the only place they could exercise free choice.  At the same time, the sexual urge, like the instinct to eat or to sleep, was regarded as irreversible, unstoppable, and indispensable.  The Greeks even called the penis “the necessity.”  So if Christians could harness their sexual urges and maintain lives built on chastity and a new way of living, they would be living proof of the end of an age.  As historian Peter Brown has argued, sexuality was an ideal locus for radical change precisely because it was an innate drive or a process.  This meant that renouncing and overcoming it was the perfect emblem for the blessed New Age.

From this perspective, the significance of the body was that it was a bridge between the individual self and society.  Adam and Eve had exercised free choice an indulged in sex, thereby provoking the Fall and postlapsarian society, the Devil-driven Present Age.  Human renunciation of sex could smash it down to re-create the exalted state of the pristine Garden of Eden.—pp. 54-55 [celibacy, sex]

…Christians, however, countered that as the Second Coming was on the horizon, they had no need to populate the earth.  Later, after the Second Coming failed to materialize, they were comforted by the notion that their chastity was preparing their souls for a triumphal admission into paradise.—p. 55 [second coming, parosia, marriage]

…But the most warped and humorless debates focus on Mary, Christ’s mother, culminating in a series of dogmas that, over the centuries, have relentlessly cleansed Mary of the earthiness and humanity she exudes in the Bible. She has metamorphosed from a virgin impregnated by the Holy Ghost to a still-virgin even after delivery, to an ever- virgin throughout her marriage, to an unearthly virgin immaculately conceived in her own mother’s womb. The theological stranglehold on Mary’s virginity, of course, has ensured that virginity in general never loses its fasci- nation as a topic for Christian thinkers.

It took over eighteen centuries to formulate the creed about Mary that the (p.56) Roman Catholic Church still subscribes to. Most other Christian denominations are uncomfortable with any but the earliest versions. Interestingly, their official fixations with virginity are in almost direct ratio to the level of their belief in Mary’s virginity.—pp. 56-57 [Mary, Virgin]

Flimsy and incomplete though the sources are, Mary’s story has been endlessly rewritten, edited, fact-checked, fact-fabricated, amplified, and commentated upon. Mariology, the Church teachings about Mary, expanded early on into a serious discipline that has devoured the scholarly lifetimes of celibate theologians. As they restructured her story, they stuffed libraries, confusing as they clarified, obfuscating as they rationalized. Then, in 1854, Pope Pius IX delivered the final edition, swaddled in the solemnity and pomp of ecclesiastical authority as an ex cathedra proclamation.—p. 57 [Mary]

How, then, had the conception happened? Origen and other Church Fathers proposed several methods: through the words of an angel: through Mary’s ear; through the mystical breath of the Holy Spirit (St. Ambrose’s favorite). Sacred art was more imaginative: semen oozing from God’s mouth down a tube ending up Mary’s skirt; a dove instead of a tube; the Angel Gabriel inserting the seed into Mary’s ear.

The Apostles’ Creed, developed at the end of the fourth century and actually formalized in the eighth, had the Holy Ghost implanting the Child fully formed rather than as a seed nourished by Mary’s body.  By the seventeenth century, Francisco Suarez, Mary’s first systematic theologian, laid it down that Mary had neither lost her virginity delivering Christ nor experienced womanly erotic sensations.  This is the basic history of virginitas anti partum.—p. 57 [Mary]

The virginal conception was relatively palatable birth, virginitas in partu. Now Mary remained virginal even after Christ’s  birth. The primary source for this was, once again, the apocryphal Book of James. In this version, the midwife who assisted in Christ’s birth met Salome and exclaimed, “A virgin has given birth, which nature never permits.” Salomé was properly disbelieving. “As sure as the Lord, my God, lives, until place my finger inside and examine her condition, I shall not believe that a virgin has given birth,” she declared.

Salomé went directly to Mary and prepared her for the examination. But as she stuck her finger into the vagina, Salomé screamed with pain and instantly withdrew it. “I have tempted the living God,” she cried. “See, my hand is consumed by fire and is falling off.” She prayed and repented, and God promptly forgave her. Through her, the proof that Mary had  delivered Christ with her hymen intact became established fact—p. 58 [Ute Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, New York: Doubleday, 1990, 343-44, citing the Proto-Gospel of Jams.] [Mary]

…Tertullian, among others, contended she did not and Jesus’ siblings were, indeed, his siblings.

Nonsense, said many other theologians.@ Christ’s brothers were actually half-brothers, Joseph’s sons by a previous marriage. What previous marriage? Suddenly the fledgling Mariologists aged the kindly, upright young carpenter into a kindly, stooped old man who had already had four sons with his first, presumably deceased wife.

This was not acceptable to Jerome, however. What about poor Joseph? “He who was worthy to be called the father of the Lord, remained a virgin.”# How dare his colleagues delete Joseph from the list of approved virgins! It was “godless, apocryphal daydreaming” to suggest that an unchaste Joseph would have been good enough for the virginal Mary. Those pesky brothers, Jerome explained, were “brethren in point of kinship” only, “not by nature.” Meaning? Cousins, of course. James, Joses, Simon, and Judas were Christ’s cousins.

Mary had become a lifelong virgin, who had birthed without interference to her hymen, and was married to Joseph, another lifelong virgin….Because Mary was so spiritually pure that she effectively had no body, and Anne and Joachim had conceived her without feeling the slightest lust. Ergo, Mary’s conception had been immaculate—and the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was born.

… In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed this as dogma: Mary’s conception was “preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”

…In 1964, however, the Second Vatican Council decided against proclaiming Mary’s virginity during and after birth as an article of faith. Too many Catholics were tormented by doubts about it.—p. 59 [Mary]

@John McHugh, The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament, New York: Doubleday, 1975, 200-201.

#Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976, 23; McHugh, 200-201, 223-25

…The great paradox of the virginalization of Mary is that its authors were celibate men who mistrusted and disliked women….—p. 60 [Mary]

…Two other major sects were the Encratites and the Gnostics, both virulently antisex celibates, whose premises deeply influenced the evolution of the mainstream Christian concept of celibacy.

          The Encratites, who were especially strong in Syria, derived their name from the Greek enkrateia—continence—their overriding principle.  They labelled marriage a “polluted and foul way of life”[“Acts of the Holy Apostle Thomas.” (trans. Klijn) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962] and beseeched future spouses to forgo the “filthy intercourse” that their leading theologian, Tatian, credited the Devil with inventing.  Virginity, on the other hand, was perfection incarnate.—p. 61 [celibacy, Virgin]

The Gnostics-gnosis means “true knowledge” in Greek-were another immensely influential Christian sect. One of the leaders, Marcion, so abhorred sexuality that he denied Jesus’ birth from a woman and portrayed him instead as a fully formed man who had floated down from the heavens. Marcion was celibate and forbade his followers to marry. He granted Christian rites such as baptism and the Eucharist only to virgins, widows, and husbands and wives who consented to “repudiate the fruit of their marriage.”[Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,184]—p. 62 [sex, celibacy]

So startling was the contrast between mainstream and Gnostic treatment of women that almost every Gnostic teacher faced charges of sexual malfeasance. No wonder—Gnostic acceptance of redeemed women as on a par with men had no parallel in Judaism, standard Christianity, or paganism. Rabbis, for instance, warned that teaching the Torah to a daughter was teaching her immorality….—p. 63 [Jew, women, marriage, celibacy]

Augustine’s youthful plea—”Lord, give me chastity and continence, but not yet”@—is perhaps the Christian world’s most famous prayer. Since he uttered it, it has resonated down through the centuries and made Augustine a soul mate in human love, confusion, and good intentions. Which one of us has not, at least once, translated his appeal into his own life, if not with chastity, then with other cherished sins?—p. 63 [Augustin]

@ The main sources for this section are Augustine (trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin), Confessions (Baltimore, Penguin, 1961)]

To the end of his long life, the man [St. Augustine]who had implored God to grant him delayed chastity urged it upon fellow Christians who had not had the benefit of his own decades of prior self-gratification….—p. 67 [Augustin, celibacy]

…Within the Roman cultural context, this was entirely reasonable. The daughters of high-ranking families were important to their fathers, who expected nothing less than irreproachable moral conduct and total obedience from their beloved girls. Even as married women, they were supposed to seek protection and support from their fathers rather than their husbands.—p. 68 [women, daughter]

          Once prostituted, a woman could never reclaim the status accorded decent women.  The law forbade Roman men to marry even repentant, retired prostitutes, who were considered eternally dishonored.  For their entire lifetimes, all prostitutes were forced to distinguish themselves from their chase sisters by appearing in the street in togas, strictly men’s wear, instead of the stolica or stole—p. 70 [prostitute]

…When Perpetua’s pagan father pleaded with her to renounce Christianity, he wept but also “threw himself at me to tear my eyes out.” [Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988, 424]  The destruction of family relations must have been one of the most unbearable consequences of conversion from paganism.—p. 75 [conversion]

As John Anglicus, Joan supposedly served as Pope in the ninth century, after her career as a monk earned her a reputation for great erudition. She had disguised herself as a monk, however, so she could secretly meet with a male monk with whom she had fallen in love. At the time of her installation, so the story goes, Joan, aka John Anglicus, was pregnant by another lover. During papal procession, she suddenly squatted down in the street and delivered a (p.80) child. The story has two endings. Either John/Joan and her son died soon after, or he grew up to become Pope Adrian III.

The legend has a hoary subplot. Because of Joan/John’s duplicity, the story continues, all subsequent popes have had to sit bare-bottomed on a papal “testing seat,” strategically pierced so a deacon can verify that new popes are indeed men rather than women or eunuchs. However, as a fifteenth-century prefect of the Vatican Library sensibly concluded, the real function of the perforated chairs, which did exist, was simply to allow the dignitary enthroned on one to answer inconvenient calls of nature.—pp. 80-81 [This story is taken from the following Sources: Rosemary Pardoe and Darroll Pardoe, The Female Pope: The Mystery of Pope Joan (Wellingborough: Curcible, 1988); Clement Wood, The Woman Who Was Pope: A Biography of Pope Joan, 853-855 (New York: William Faro, 1931); and Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), 368-69] [Pope, Church authority]

The transvestite saints were outstanding women among legions of other fake-male monks, revered by their church though they flouted canon and biblical law and duped abbots and fellow monks….—p. 81 [Nun, Catholics]

Unlike so many male monks, none of the transvestites complained of difficulty in observing their vows of celibacy. Celibacy was, after all, what first drove them into the monasteries, celibacy rooted in religious zeal….—p. 81 [Celibacy]

…For over fifteen years he {Anthony} persisted, only to conclude, “He who wishes to live in solitude in the desert is delivered from three conflicts: (p.83) hearing, speech, and sight; there is only one conflict for him and that is with fornication.” [Norman Rousselle, trans., The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, London, Oxford: Mowbray, 1981,143]—pp. 83-84 [sex, monk]

Cassian endorsed the two-loaf daily-meal plan as a six-month path to sexual chastity. Historian Aline Rousselle agrees, after comparing it with a U.S. wartime experiment on malnutrition on male sexuality. Thirty-two men knowingly reduced their food intake from 1,700 to 1,400 calories daily and maintained this level for six months. By then, their sexuality had shrunk as much as their bellies: no more sexual desire, dreams, aggressions, or nocturnal ejaculations. Ergo, Cassian was probably right. Starve the belly, nourish chastity.—p. 85 [sex, chastity, food]

Both ascetics and medical men believed sperm was the consequence of an overabundance of food, the antidote to which was fasting or drying out the body. The drier the body, the better for the soul….—p. 86 [sex, food]

It sometimes happened that years and years of subduing the flesh and carnal instincts-fasting, praying, eating, keeping vigil—drove Fathers into breakdowns known as adiaphoria. They would escape their tiny cells and tramp across the wasteland, grubbing for grassy herbs, chomping and sucking and devouring them, staving off the perpetual pangs of hunger and the relentless grind and slow pace of their solitary lives. This state of adiaphoria, in fact, troubled the Fathers even more than eroticism, even the sexual lapses they sometimes observed in others or could not prevent in themselves.—p. 86 [monk]

Most Fathers endured the anguish of lustful thoughts and longings but resisted them, even to the point of self-mutilation and mortification. Some went to extraordinary lengths to preserve their celibacy. Ammonius seared his flesh with a flame-red iron to dispel his carnal passions. Old Pachon braved a went to hyenas’ den, expecting death, and placed an asp next to his genitals. Evagrius, who was in love with a noblewoman, froze desire by submerging himself in an icy well. A Father obsessed by memories of a beautiful woman devised the most gruesome lust preventative of all. After someone informed him the woman had died, he located her corpse and dunked his cape in her putrefying flesh. This cape he carefully preserved, so its stench would quash his fixation on her loveliness. He died, aged fifty-four, lust-free for three years.

General rules were more helpful: do nothing to risk evoking women’s images, avoiding even Scriptures that mention them; keep perfect silence and do not speak of or to them; do not meet anyone’s eyes so that you will not notice if a woman should happen past you. A monk who slipped to one side of the trail as some nuns walked by was reproached by their superior: “If you were a perfect monk, you would not have looked at us have seen that we were women.” [Norman Rousselle, trans., The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, London, Oxford: Mowbray, 1981,141]

Women were, however, a rare commodity in the desert. Young boys were much commoner, and so many Fathers succumbed to their charms that many of the Sayings, the Fathers’ collective wisdom, railed against cohabiting with children. But some sons arrived with their fathers, while others were entrusted to them as youngsters. “When you see young children, take up your sheepskins, and go away,” [ibid. 148]advised one wise Father. Said another, “Do not bring young boys here. Four churches in Scetis are deserted because of boys.” [Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, London: Mowbray, 1975 quoting Isaac, Priest of the Cells.]

The most obvious source of temptation was each other, and Fathers resisted as best they could, shielded by their solitary lifestyles. Few, however, abandoned their vocation because of a lapse, homosexual or otherwise. They repented, sought counsel from other, older anchorites, and renewed their attempts to achieve a perfect life.

For centuries, the pitiless desert was a metaphorical reflection of the Fathers’ battle for chastity. They hunkered down in its inhospitable crannies, famished, endlessly fasting, tempted by the food they thought would heighten their already throbbing senses, much of their lives devoted to prayer and contemplation of their every sinful thought. The remedy provoked the ailment, or so it must have seemed, as they accused, tried, and judged themselves guilty of lustfulness, the dreaded enemy of the celibacy they strove so painfully to achieve.—p. 87 [monk, chastity]

Simeon was a Syrian shepherd’s son who wandered into a church, where he was converted to Christianity and had a vision that called him to the religious life. He joined other ascetics, then entered the monastery at Teleda. Its strict regime did not satisfy Simeon, a sweet-tempered, enduring man whose humility failed him only in his ambition to be the most abstemious of all. His most drastic attempt at this nearly killed him, precisely the result he had intended. He wrapped a rope all around his body, binding himself inside it like a corpse. Somehow he managed to pull it so tight, his flesh putrefied and worms crawled over it in a giant feast. As they ate him alive, Simeon must have rejoiced, for he wished to die in this martyrly fashion. Presumably his brother monks intervened, forcibly releasing him and cleansing his wounds, because after this incident, the abbot and the entire community requested him to leave.

Simeon left but did not go far. He built a small, domed hut on a nearby hill and remained there for three years. Then he lived in the open air, inside a circle of stones. His next abode was a pillar, on which he stood and prayed continuously. Two pillars later, he had reached his summit: a pillar sixty feet high, topped with a six-foot-square platform with an enclosure. There Simeon stood, exposed to the blazing sun, the driving rain, and the freezing winds, until he died in 459, over seventy years old.

Simeon’s object in standing perpetually on a pillar, an unknown Christian austerity, was to dedicate his life to prayer by uniting his body and soul. He did this by totally suppressing his carnality. Even to himself, Simeon must have been a worshipful metaphor of the phrase “standing before the Lord.” In the harsh, hungry fifth-century Byzantine world, Simeon drew the pain and the hunger, the fear and the sorrow, within his own body. With Simeon at its apex, the pillar became an altar and its lonely inhabitant the incense wafting upward to heaven.

Sixty feet beneath, needy supplicants gathered, until Simeon’s pillar, conveniently located on a major commercial route, became a pilgrimage center. People poured in from all over, even Spain, Britain, France, and Italy. One of Simeon’s contemporary hagiographers described the throngs as “a human sea into which rivers from all sides debouched.”

Simeon’s devotees, however, had to be male, for he barred women from gathering around his pillar, despite the sixty-foot buffer. He refused to see even his own mother and communicated with women only through male messengers. This was consistent with male domination and also with ascetic terror of the concupiscent powers of Eve’s daughters. So though celibacy was guaranteed by Simeon’s solitary vigil in the air, he protected himself by banishing all temptation.

Simeon’s minimal needs were met by his followers, while he ministered to their greatest. He had an eclectic agenda: sickness and pain, infertility, sinful-(89)ness, social issues, natural disasters. By the thousands, male pilgrims hiked miles along a dusty path, then trekked up the mountainside for a chance to climb up the ladder and consult the saintly man who performed miracles.

These consultations had to be scheduled, for Simeon had a rigid timetable . He prayed from sunset to 3 P.M., when he delivered a divine teaching. Only then was he free to listen, counsel, and heal. He intervened in tax disputes, assisted guild workers, cucumber farmers, and choirboys; healed the sick; converted pagans; and averted plagues, famines, and other calamities. In his hagiographer’s words, “He can be seen sitting in judgement and handing down proper and just sentences.” As his reputation spread, he became an important diplomat, advocating for the poor, negotiating between the emperor and the defiant bedouin tribes, and soothing ecclesiastical squabbles. During debates on the extent and nature of Mary’s virginity, Church Fathers even sought Simeon’s chaste opinion.

Simeon’s saintliness radiated so far that others were inspired to emulate him. Daniel, a Mesopotamian monk, ascended to the platform and was transformed by Simeon’s radiant holiness and by his promise that Daniel would have his tunic after he died. Daniel left and stood for the next thirty- three years at the edge of Constantinople, until he died at age eighty-four. Until the late nineteenth century, Eastern Stylites such as Daniel modeled themselves on Simeon and stood for lifetimes on pillars, worshiping God

Simeon’s extreme (and at first glance, bizarre) asceticism appealed to generations of desperate pilgrims and religious. It symbolized apostolic simplicity frozen forever, a pure minute for a lifetime, a square pulpit for a world, perfect deprivation for serial austerities. The wild, unkempt, and radiant sou who stood, arms outstretched like a human crucifix, was the final solution to the yearnings in the hearts of those who beheld him. The little-educated shepherd’s son who corresponded with emperors and chastised tax collectors, averted droughts and reconciled feuding families, had endured harsh life for the privilege, figuratively as well as literally, of hovering close to the chaste unsexed, hallowed angels he longed to join.—89-90 [monk] [St. Simeon’s Chastity at Sixty Feet High: The source for the following section and for quotations is Susan Ashbrook Harvey (trans. Robert Doran), The Lives of Simeon Stylites (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992]

These ammas-Mothers-faced the same challenges: hunger, fear, doubt, and lust, probably in that order. Mary of Egypt’s life was fabricated from tales of dozens of real ammas, and her struggle to achieve indifference to perpetual hunger reflects the way the real ammas recounted their experiences to the scholars and spiritual seekers who tracked them down or simply encountered them on the peripheries of the Old Men’s settlements.—p. 91[Nuns]

Febronia and Alexandra were Christian virgins celebrated for devotion to virginity so extreme, they isolated themselves from all contact with temptable men. Febronia was a Syrian nun reared since infancy in a convent near Nisibis. The sisters there were famous for their learning and wisdom, but Febronia was exceptionally talented. She was also famous for the diligence of her asceticism and was also praised for having never seen or been seen by a man. For this reason particularly, Febronia’s name was cherished in the convent as well as the city proper

During the persecutions in 302, vindictive pagans discovered and jailed this hidden treasure.  They were excited by the challenge of conducting her mostly sexual interrogation-by-torture in public, savoring her agonies by extending them so she did not die at once but lingered for a satisfying long time.  Finally, uttering pious words, Febronia left this world without recanting.  The legion of women who mourned her death included pagans, for all women lamented the tragedy of her death and her violation at the hands of men…..[The main sources for this section are Ambrose, “Concerning Virgins,” Nicene Fathers, vol. 10 (Leiden: Fathers of the Church Press, 1991) also available on-line: http//ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers2.html);—p.91 [Nuns, virgin]

…When early Christianity urged its women to pledge perpetual virginity, it had a more compelling motive than their spiritual righteousness. What was also at stake was the shaky spiritual righteousness of Christian males, who would otherwise succumb to mortal temptation in the face of the burning female eroticism that had so fatally tempted males ever sing Adam. The solution, obviously, was female chastity, though it required enormous personal sacrifices from all women, including childlessness. The reward for this was proportionately high: great respect from the Church and society and possible sanctification.

Except for St. Augustine, whose heavy personal baggage included his decades-long indulgence in sexual liaisons, the Church Fathers believed women were lustier than men. From this premise (shared by most cultures from the Aztec to the Chinese), it followed that a woman who successfully repressed he innately lascivious nature was holy indeed. Furthermore, her steadfast celibacy protected men from temptation, making female virgins literally God-sent. Second best were born-again virgins, who had married or whored but were determined never to stoop to carnality again. Febronia and Alexandra were venerated not merely as virgins but as so adamantly virginal that they withdrew entire from society.—p. 92 [Nun, virgin]

…The ideal was an active, independent life of devotion and service out in the world. Take, for instance, the apostle Paul’s disciple Thecla, who is probably fictional and modeled on St. Macrina, the sister of the two saints Gregory and Basil. Thecla was deeply religious, educated, articulate, and independent, the product of a family of comfortable circumstances. Such women manifested their faith their own way, often in quite public venues. Thecla was already betrothed when she first heard Paul preach. She found his comments about celibacy so spellbinding that, for three days, she sat in a window, motionless and without eating, listening to him. Her mother was so anxious about her daughter that she sent for Thamyris, her fiancé. But instead of hearing him out, Thecla broke off their engagement, an act with enormous social repercussions, since annulling a betrothal was tantamount to divorce. Thamyris was furious and so jealous of Paul that he persuaded the city leaders and the Roman governor to imprison him.

Thecla, obsessed with Paul, [Virginia Burrus, Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts, Lewiston, N.Y: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987, 125-126] bribed a jail guard and followed him into the prison. When the Roman citizens heard about this, they forced the authorities to act. Paul was flogged and exiled from Rome. Thecla was condemned to death by burning, but God directed the roaring flames away from her and sent a rain-filled cloud to burst over her funeral pyre, extinguishing the fire. Thecla stepped away from this close call with death to catch with Paul, up who had been released from prison and had resumed his missionary work.

Thecla insisted on traveling about the country with Paul.[Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); 126] She cut her hair and implored him to allow her to disguise herself in boy’s clothing, a request which Paul found repellent but reluctantly permitted. Thecla became an evangelist herself. However, despite her good works and resolute celibacy, she was unable to convince him to baptize her. Meanwhile, Alexander, a civic leader, fell in love with her; as Paul had warned her, “Thou are comely.” Alexander asked Paul if he could buy her, but Paul denied even knowing her. Alexander forced himself on Thecla, who rejected him violently and in public. Humiliated, he dragged her before the governor. Thecla’s intransigence landed her once again in prison and earned her another death sentence, this time in a contest with a savage beast in the arena.

In preparation for his encounter with Thecla, her lion executioner had been starved for days. In the arena, he lunged, no doubt salivating in anticipation of her tender, maidenly flesh. But Thecla did a curious thing: she leaned over and, in Ambrose’s words, “offered her vital parts to the fierce lion.” [Ambrose, “Concerning Virgins,” Nicene Fathers, vol. 10, book 2, chap. 3, (Leiden: Fathers of the Church Press, 1991) also available on-line: http//ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers2.html); Ambrose (trans. Daniel Callam), On Virginity (Saskatoon: Peregrina Publishing Co;, 1987)] He stopped dead, amazed to see she was a virgin. Then he dropped to the ground and licked her feet, unable to “injure the sacred body of a virgin.” Other beasts were brought in, but more miraculous phenomena rescued Thecla. Saved again, she baptized herself, committing her soul to God. The Romans, dumbfounded by this extraordinary spectacle, freed her, and she (93) struck out again, proselytizing and gathering around her a group of Christian  virgins who looked to her as an amma.—pp.93-94 [Nun, virgin]

By the fourth century, the Council of Elvira devised a public pact of  virginity” in which a bishop would ceremoniously veil a woman’s head and intone, “I wish to present you… as a chaste virgin to Christ.” [E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (New York: Verso, 1991, 32-33, citing Jerome, “To Demetrias.”] The veiled virgin would respond, “The king hath brought me into his chambers,” and companions would add, “The king’s daughter is all glorious within.” The designated virgin was now categorized, and the Church dictated her lifestyle: sequestered, locked into her room praying and serving Christ. And why not? Was she not married to him? “Do not seek the Bridegroom in the streets,” [Jerome, “To Demetrias,” ”, “To Eustochium,” “To Laeta,” Nicene Fathers, vol. 4 (Leiden: Fathers of the Church Press, 1991); also available online http//ccel.wheaton.edu/fathers2.html) 32-33]Jerome warned, “stay home with [Him],”

The Fathers meant staying home literally–no more going to market or weddings or public events or celebrations, even visits to anyone but other official virgins, certainly not “the daughters of a strange land.” She could, however, attend church, but only under a veil.  After all, Jerome reminded them, “Jesus is jealous. He does not choose that your face should be seen of others.”[Ibid. 32]

The next logical thought—and the Fathers thought it—was that these Brides of Christ should not live alone. The Fathers pointed to the excesses of male hermits and concluded, “If all this is true of men, how much more does it apply to women, whose fickle and vacillating minds, if left to their own devices, soon degenerate.”[ibid. Jerome, “To Demetriasn,” 270] Ergo, they invented a spiritual community of virgins all married to Jesus, “the true Man,” under the guidance of a spiritual elder.

An ascetic lifestyle was also prescribed, with daily fasting, meager meals of bland, unseasoned vegetables and mild herbs accompanied by water, never wine. The object, Jerome wrote, was to create a virginal community “women pale and thin with fasting.” Dirty, smelly, too, for barking was an immodest, stimulating activity no decent virgin should indulge in. Anyway, “a deliberate squalor… makes haste to spoil her natural good looks,” and the sooner spoiled, the better-another temptress less. [ibid. Jerome, “To Eustochium,” 28; “To Laeta,” 194]

A virgin would also observe almost total silence—the Fathers found chattering virgins loathsome….—p. 94 [nun, virgin]

Virgins could also strengthen their resolve by recalling the horrors of marital life, the agonies of childbirth, the irascibility of husbands, and the grief when children died.—p. 95 [nun, virgin]

… Another more critical flaw in the Fathers’ portrayal of virginity was that so many Christian women disagreed with some of its premises-for instance, that sensuality was bad. They did not accept or fear the evil the Fathers saw in womanly bodies; to the contrary, they celebrated the God-given senses. “We need to seek how to please God in our bodily members [as well] as spiritually,” Constantina declared, then lovingly inventoried the carnal senses, describing rapturously how delightful each was. God designed and created bodies, she reasoned, and so the senses innate to them must be good, and God must intend them to be well used and never abused.

Constantina’s equanimity about-indeed, her reverence for-the wonders of touch, sight, sound, and smell was shared by other Christian virgins. So was her indifference to the Fatherly strictures about staying home alone. These women valued celibacy and never questioned its spiritual power, but they could and did challenge much else. They understood the burdens marriage and childbirth would bring and rejoiced that the virginity that liberated (p.95) them also made them spiritually superior. But they interpreted that superiority as meaning  freedom as well, to travel, to teach, to preach, to speak out in public, to minister to willing acolytes.—pp. 95-96 [Nun, virgin] [Ambrose (trans. Daniel Callam), On Virginity (Saskatoon: Peregrina Publishing Co;, 1987), 40]

Many women and men as well swore  perpetual celibacy and then set up family-style housekeeping together. They maintained strictest chastity, lived according to the dictates of Christian asceticism, but also observed traditional divisions of labor. As one male celibate explained, he enjoyed this arrangement.  His female partner cared for his belongings, prepared food and set the table, made his bed, lit the fire, and even washed his feet.  Bishops frowned on this modus vivendi and ordered participants to do penance for their sinfulness, but it was common during Christianity’s first four centuries, and even bishops entered into it.—p. 96 [celibacy, monk, nun]

Alexandra and Melania were a study in contrasts.  While the virginal Alexandra martyred herself inside a tomb, the confident, resourceful, privileged, and formerly wealthy Melania wore her celibacy like armor against danger. First she browbeat her unwilling husband, Pinian, to swear a mutual oath of chastity. Her strategy was brutally simple: she stopped bathing.  Pinian, however, desperate for a son, persisted. Melania capitulated, bore two children, who both died, then resumed her campaign for celibacy. By the time she succeeded, she had reversed the power structure of their marriage, dictating Pinian’s clothing and even where he lived-away from her.   First came her foray into isolated deprivation. Then, with a band of like-minded virgins, she began to travel.

…Then, in a pointedly antipatriarchal vein, she praised child birth as divinely created and blessed the vaginas that gave birth to saints, apostles, and other holy people. (p.96)

…She also laid down community house rules much milder than the Fathers’. Instead of their orthodox self- denigration and abstemiousness, she demanded excellence and simplicity. The Fathers’ vaunted silence, for instance, was not part of her vocabulary. From dawn to dusk, her community resonated not with serene stillness but with her animated voice discussing theology with her enthusiastic virgins.—pp. 96-97 [Alexandra and Melania: The story of Melania is from E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (New York: Verso, 1991, 114-22] [virgin, celibacy, nun]

Melania’s brand of asceticism was relatively mild. Unlike the Fathers, she did not require rigorous fasting, which she considered only a minor virtue. She diligently divested herself of her enormous personal fortune and, with more effort, gave up the lavish clothes, jewels, and elaborate hairstyle appropriate to a high-ranking married woman. Her new clothes expressed her new vocation, her changed marital status, and her emancipation from male authority. Even her funereal garments proclaimed her personal status to the world.

…And Melania herself directed every step she took along the path to saintliness, accepting what she wished to, but rejecting even received wisdom if it clashed with her own analyses.—p. 97 [The story of Melania is from E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (New York: Verso, 1991, 114-22] [virgin, celibacy, nun]

CHAPTER 3

Later Christianity

CELIBACY AND CLERICS MEDIEVAL EASTERN MONASTERIES

Life in a desert community, no matter how small and haphazardly organized, centered on the spiritual authority of an abba (abbot) or Old Man. The father, wrestling with his demons, could only hope to elude them if he opened his heart to the Old Man. “For nothing displeases the demon of fornication more than to reveal his works, and nothing gives him greater pleasure than to keep one’s thoughts to oneself,” {Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, 228} explained an ancient Christian authority.—p. 99 [monk, devil]

Christian monasticism was the revolutionary movement that ultimately queried the very existence of nonmonastic life: Could true Christians exist outside the chaste, austere, and otherworldly precincts of these “great, walled- in monasteries… in clusters of cells built into the sandy plateau of Egypt like ancient grave-houses, on the tops of mountains, perched on columns, walled up in the nooks and crannies of the cities… huddled in grottoes carved into the cliffs and in the fairy-tale rock formation of great ravines”? [Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988, 435]—p. 99 [monk]

…These early Christian pioneer Desert Fathers in their improvised cells became known as monks monachos—from the Greek word monos, one who lives alone, though they were quite different from the later fathers, who belonged to more structured establishments.—p. 100 [monk]

          In his Precepts, Pachomius spelled out correct, chaste brotherly behavior.  First of all, monks must not tempt each other.  They should, therefor, observe the following niceties: covering their knees when sitting together; laundry; keeping eyes lowered and avoiding direct glances at other brothers, at work and even during the silent meals; never borrowing from or lending to each other; never doing or requesting a brotherly favour; never performing such intimacies as removing a thorn from another monk’s foot or bathing or oiling one another; never contriving to be alone with another brother, either in a cell, on sleeping mats on the terraces, in a boat, or riding donkey-back; never talking to each other in the dark; never holding hands; always maintaining an arm’s-length distance between each other; abstaining from joining in the games and laughter of children raised in the monastery; never locking the cell door; and always knocking before entering a cell.—p. 100 [Herbert Workman, The evolution of the Monastic Ideal: From the Earliest Times Down to the Coming of the Friars (London: Epworth Press, 1927) 88; [Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988, 415] [monk]

The ascetic regimen was also strict, though not as severe as among the fathers. Fasting was the daily habit, with a recommended single, simple meal. Bread, with salt, was the main staple. Monks who could not wait it out till the setting sun summoned them to the day’s repast were permitted to eat twice, the first time in early afternoon. However, they did not receive more rations. The usual amount was merely divided into two portions.

The timing of the evening meal permitted the brothers to sleep without the cramps that otherwise attacked their shrunken, rumbling stomachs. In wintertime, Pachomius ate only every third day. This near-starvation diet, of course, was a principal tool in the struggle to maintain sexual chastity by dampening all sexual desires.—p. 101 [food, sex, monk]

…In the West, these incidents became so commonplace they could not be considered lapses but ways of life for entire communities. Some monasteries installed lay rather than religious abbots, and these men transplanted their entire households to live among the monks: wives, children, soldiers, hunting dogs. Not surprisingly, given this intrusive worldliness and sexual flamboyance, (p.102) monks emulated their superiors’ examples, bad as well as good. At one time the monks of Italy’s Farfa abbey openly recognized their concubines. In France, the monks of Trosly were nearly all married, and each monk of St. Gildas at Ruits abbey “supported himself and his concubines, as well as his sons and daughters,” [Peter Abelard, (trans. Henry Adams Bellows), The Story of My Misfortunes (Glencoe: Free Press, 1972),  63] reported abbey official Peter Abelard. Abelard himself was castrated by agents of Canon Fulbert of Notre Dame, the powerful cleric whose niece Heloise Abelard tutored, seduced, impregnated, and later married.

Homosexuality was also rampant in these sexually permissive cloisters where celibacy was a flickering light at best, an extinguished wick at worst….—pp. 102-103 [monk]

Centuries later, Italian seminaries employed the “purity paddle,” a wooden paddle shaped like a small oar that was used to tuck shirts into trousers. This minimized the tantalizing proximity twixt hand and genitals, because the paddle did the actual tucking in and kept fingers as far away as possible from the unmentionable, untouchable, unseeable, but ever-so-sensitive nether region.—p. 103 [sex, monk]

A large part of the problem was that too many monasteries forgot the primacy of their religious focus. Wealth, sometimes great wealth, stole into their collectivities, preoccupying and seducing them. They became major landowners with vast agricultural capacity and a committed, unpaid workforce. Monks and their relatives from wealthier families, along with other, devout Christians, willed the monasteries fortunes and more property. The holdings remained intact, protected from division between two or more legatees, as secular possessions were….—p. 103 [monk]

…This was typical; the monasteries had become huge, wealthy corporations without temporal protection, so feudal nobles and kings preyed on, attacked, terrorized, dismantled, and robbed them.—p. 104 [monk]

…German abbots were particularly enthusiastic about their military obligations. In 981, for example, they supplied hundreds more knights to Otto II’s army than his lay vassals contributed.

On the political and diplomatic level, abbots and monks were their monarch’s most trusted—hence powerful—advisers: Alcuin the monk with Charlemagne; Benedict of Aniane with Louis the Pious; the abbot of Fulda with Germany’s Henry IV; Archbishop Lanfranc of Canterbury and his successor,  the abbot of Bec, St. Anselm, with William the Conqueror, then with his son Henry I.—p. 104 [monk]

The tortuous historical development of monasteries and the Church piloted Christian monks away from the celibate ideal and lifestyle. Reform of the sorry and chaotic mess that was medieval monasticism led back to it. In 1073, Benedictine monk Hildebrand became Pope Gregory VII and unleashed his own burning agenda on his extended flock: perfect celibacy for all Christian.—p. 104 [celibacy, monk]

…Gregorian Reform aimed, quite simply, to smash the old order and replace it with a new order of papal supremacy, liberating Christendom from secular rulers and placing it squarely under papal domination. This new order-Christianitas-was Gregory VII’s vision of an ascetic, renunciatory, monastic Christian world with a papal abbot at its helm.

Five decades of struggle, agitation, repression, and crisis settled the question: Gregorian Reform failed. Instead, the purest religious withdrew into other, Cistercian monasteries much like the ancient Egyptian ones, refuges from the secular world….—p. 105 [monk]

Each morning that they awoke to discover moist evidence of the previous night’s sinfulness sticky on their thighs, the brothers dutifully refused to celebrate mass. They did this out of deepest conscience, to comply with their order’s regulations on the subject.

But the matter reached crisis proportions when an of masses were scheduled and so many monks had the public was apprised of the situation and, worse, of what had caused it. The prior was deeply embarrassed and hastily changed directions. ‘He conceded that anybody at all could and should celebrate Mass, even if he had had nocturnal pollutions.” [Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976, 433]

This affair of the wet dreams made a deep impression on Brother Martin Luther. He reflected on their nature and ultimately concluded that unprovoked emissions were natural and therefore acceptable, but that those stimulated by conscious effort were sinful, except in marriage. It also led him to ponder other aspects of sexuality. From nocturnal emissions he extrapolated to sex itself, declaring that depriving the body of a natural, God-ordained function was dangerous. Slowly and radically, his views on celibacy became diametrically opposed to received Catholic wisdom.—p. 106 [monk, semen]

CELIBACY ONE, LUST ZERO

Even with monastic cells swarming with scoundrels and scandals, religious authorities thought Irish holy man Scuthin was acting outrageously. Could what they heard be true, that Scuthin took two voluptuous maidens into his bed each night? They sent Brendan the Navigator to investigate.

At bedtime, two lovely young women appeared at Brendan’s lodgings. Upon entering the room where Brendan lay in bed, the duo crawled into bed and snuggled up against him, assuring him that this is what they did every night with Scuthin.

Brendan lay sleepless, tossing and turning restlessly, tormented by lust. After a while the women spoke out, complaining about Brendan’s obvious problem Their usual bedmate never responded at all, they said, though sometimes he had to resort to jumping into a tub of cold water. Brendan was astonished and realized the injustice of accusing Scuthin of sexual impropriety.

Later, Brendan met the man he had been sent to spy on. Scuthin explained how he slept with the full-breasted temptresses to challenge himself, so that-shades of the Great Old Man Barsanuphius-the lust he conquered (p.106) would be all the greater. Brendan was totally won over, and he and Scuthin became good friends.

Centuries later, Scuthin and Brendan were made saints. In a reckless age going out of control, Scuthin was a righteous man who nightly tested his sexuality and, by the same token, his spirituality. Twentieth-century India’s Mahatma Gandhi would have understood his—brahmacharya experiments were a sophisticated Hindu version of Scuthin’s Christian ones.—Scuthin is Richard Zacks, History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: Harper Collins, 19941), 41]pp. 106-107 [Celibacy]

…The first Christian clergy were not highly trained professionals. They were men-only men-who lived and worked alongside their coreligionists and functioned like everyone else. This included marrying, and for the first centuries of Christianity, clergymen married, made love to their wives, and produced children.

Lifetime celibacy was, as we have seen, a primarily Christian preoccupation. Most pagans and Jews considered it peculiar and unnatural, detrimental to society, and fatal to the species. The law required pagan priests to marry, and most Jewish religious leaders did so voluntarily, though they abstained from sexual relations before and during certain festivals and ritual events, such as sacrificing at the altar. But as the struggling cult of Christianity swelled in number, its leaders began to argue that a permanently celibate priesthood should be established.

…To this day, clerical celibacy is the most divisive, difficult, and draining issue in the Roman Catholic Church, the only Chris- tian denomination to demand it….—p. 107 [Priest, Celibacy]

Meanwhile, the first concerted calls to impose clerical celibacy began in the by the fourth century. By 250, some clergymen were celibate by conviction, reinforced by the occasion canon that endorsed/recommended/demanded celibacy. However, large numbers were married and fully intended to stay married.

This sentiment was forcefully expressed by Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais. God, the law, and “the sacred hand of Bishop Theophilus” had given him a wife, he declared, and he had no intention of leaving her or of having clandestine relations with her, which would make a mockery of marriage. In any case, he expected to father numerous children with her.  In other words, Bishop Synesius categorically refused to stoop to the subterfuge of so many his colleagues: skirt the issue, protect their jobs, swear false vows of celibacy, then contrive, in unpriestly stealth, to creep into her bed at night and pray—if they dared-that no children would arrive to give the lie to the supposedly chaste marital arrangement.

The battle to impose celibacy on clergymen lasted over one thousand year and ended in victory in the thirteenth century. It was a downhill fight, targeting first the highest prelates and gradually, slowly, lowering the sights of the cannon downward until even the humblest priest was included in its scope.

The celibacy issue also helped perpetuate the rent in the Church, with the Western clergy triumphantly celibate, at least in theory, and the Easter clergy unabashedly uncelibate, in theory as well as in fact. But until the thirteenth century, even among disunited Western clerics and policy-makers celibacy was primarily a monkish thing.

What really matters in this story is not so much the details of its development—intermitten religious edicts blatant defiance, compromise, retreat, renewed attack, sullen acceptance, furtive noncompliance–but the doctrinal basis for imposing it and the social context in which it happened. We already know the climax of the tale of the Church’s great rift: the Protestant Reformation, and integral to it, former monk Martin Luther’s vitriolic offensive against clerical celibacy. “Nothing.” Luther thundered, “sounds worse to my ears than the words ‘nun,’ ‘monk’ and ‘priest.'[Martin Luther,(ed. Jaroslav Pelikan),  “Letter to Nicholas,” Luther’s Works, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955-1986);  vol. 48, 321-322]—p. 108 [Priest, celibacy]

A watershed was reached when Christian emperor Constantine issued his 313 edict legitimizing Christianity. By then, the Fathers had inadvertently (p.108) captured the popular imagination, and their asceticism and fixation on purest celibacy fascinated and influenced many. The monastic movement that evolved from their humble little settlements also revolutionized Christian- and some pagan-thought. So did Augustine of Hippo’s famous teachings, and the Confessions, which struck straight into so many sinful hearts. For women and some men, the heroic virgins Constantina and Helia, and the ex-harlot, born-again virgin Mary of Egypt, inspired fanatical devotion to as an ideal central to Christianity.—pp. 108-109 [Monk,celibacy]

This was the loose tapestry upon which Christian officialdom embroidered with squirmy, lopsided stitches the wavering lines of their policy on clerical celibacy. For the first few centuries of the new religion, the main thrust of policy-making consisted of intermittent rulings that bestowed exalted religious status on the clergy. Then, in 305, the synod of Elvira published a canon prohibiting all clerics, from bishops down to deacons, from having sexual relations or children with their wives. The penalty for flouting this canon was defrocking.

Of the eighty-one canons ratified at Elvira, almost half, including the one cited above, concerned sex, meting out stricter penalties for sexual truancy than for heresy and other grave sins. So many clergymen were married that these celibacy crusaders outlawed marital sex but did not dare ban marriage itself. Nonetheless, theirs was a shattering pronouncement. For the tiniest infraction, clergy and laymen risked eternal exclusion from the Holy Eucharist.

Elvira was a draconian edict and, given the realities of the day, rash, foolish, and unenforceable. No wonder that two decades later, at Nicaea, a Church council reversed it. Paphnutius, the Egyptian martyr who had preferred to be blinded in one eye rather than renounce his Christian beliefs, argued strongly against clerical celibacy on the grounds that it was too difficult for most men. In any case, he said, marriage was a respectable form of life. Paphnutius swayed many by the force of his reasoning and also of his character. He was personally celibate, so he spoke purely on principle. Other synods and councils confirmed this marriage-tolerant attitude. In 345, a ruling at Gangra censured worshipers who declined a sacrament because it was dispensed by a married priest.—p. 109 [Priest, celibacy]

From 370 onward, papal dicta banned clerics from indulging in sexual relations. These dicta were widely considered unenforceable, and most married priests continued to sleep with their wives. However, clerics did interpret the papal decrees as a ban against a clergyman’s right to marry after he was ordained. They also suspected that unmarried candidates would be favored in the Church, and that celibacy would be a good career move.

Over the years, the celibacy campaign pressed on. In 401, priests at Carthage were required to swear an oath of celibacy, the first-ever instance of this. Churchwide, a priest’s private life was now-theoretically-heavily  monitored. His wife had to be virginal at the time of marriage and remain so forever. She could not share his bedroom, much less his bed. Instead, she passed her nights elsewhere, with a chaperone, while he lay with other clerics. Should her husband die, the widowed virgin was not permitted to have another go at marriage. A later edict went further: married clergymen had to leave their wives at their ordination.

And so it went, edicts, rulings, papal decrees, a plethora of sometimes contradictory and usually petty decisions leading inexorably to a policy, in the Western but never the Eastern Church, of clerical celibacy from top to bottom. The policy varied from time to time and place to place, and often the impact was negligible. By 400, however, sexual abstinence had been imposed on all major clerics in the Western Church. By 450, the net had extended to include even the lowly position of subdeacon. Despite official decrees, however, the campaign to enforce clerical celibacy encountered persistent opposition. In 483 and again in 535, it was seriously undermined by two embarrassing papal elections-Popes Felix II and Agapitus I were both the sons of priests.—p. 110 [priest, celibacy]

…Material life in the Consider postclassical West was so brutishly difficult that, while it also drove some unreligious men into ostensibly celibate monasteries as havens from hunger, it drove some sincere priests to marry as a form of economic survival. Alongside side the children they would produce, wives could cultivate the parish landholdings and in other ways arrange to feed and clothe their priest husbands. More ambitious priests contrived to marry women with dowries, property, or small businesses, even if the latter consumed so much of the couple’s time that the business of religion was secondary to the exigencies of commerce.—p. 111 [Priest, celibacy]

…Take, for example, the following list of penances: Clerics who sinned carnally would be imprisoned and allowed only bread and water. An ordained priest would be flogged until he bled, suffer other punishment other punishment at the bishop’s discretion, and serve two years in jail. Clerks or monks, however, were treated more leniently-three bouts of flogging followed by various penances performed during a one-year term in prison. Worse was in store for the wives and children-they were to be sold into slavery.—p. 111 [celibacy, priest]

An objective overall assessment of clerical celibacy is difficult. We lack sufficiently credible sources, and the celibate life is by nature private and seldom documented. Estimates of how widespread it was vary wildly, but Peter Brown, a highly respected authority on the early Church, suggests that by late in the sixth century, few priests had wives and the same was true for the bishops, most of them former monks who had left ascetic cloisters to take up administrative positions in the cities. That said, so many legitimately documented examples of widespread, flagrant violations exist that it is equally clear that, though celibacy was becoming the norm from the highest ecclesiastical levels down to the lower clergy, egregiously uncelibate clerical lifestyle continued to challenge the official policy.—p. 112 [celibacy]

Until Gregorian Reform in the eleventh century, married clergy continued to function. Most claimed to be celibate and perhaps were. Civil law recognized their unions as legitimate, but canon law defined their wives as “concubines” and their children as “bastards,” legally barred from inheriting property. Furthermore, their sons were barred from the priesthood.

These restrictions were easily circumvented. Sons and daughters were introduced as nephews and nieces and raised with the priest and his with the priest and his wife.   Alternatively, if a “bastard” son felt called to the priesthood, a bishop could subject to the pope’s approval, grant a dispensation to permit it. As late as 1398, for instance, one dispensation for fifty illegitimate males included ten sons of clergymen.—p. 112 [priest, celibacy]

…Undoubtedly the Reform convinced more clergymen to adopt celibacy and attracted more ascetic-minded men and women into service and cloisters. Ultimately, it was sabotaged by the notorious disobedience of lustful priests, bishops, even popes, and also a chorus of dissent openly challenging celibacy as a valid form of life even for clerics.

Individual violation of this newly compulsory celibacy was extraordinary, even at the highest levels. Pope John XIII committed adultery and incest. In 1171, the abbot-elect of St. Augustine at Canterbury fathered seventeen children in a single village, but this was a puny production compared to a twelfth-century bishop of Liège who was unseated because he had sired sixty-five. The most ludicrous, later-century case was Pope Innocent VIII, a proud father who publicly acknowledged his brood of “bastards” and was then forgiven because he had been honest.—p. 113 [Priest, celibacy]

…Martin Luther’s, which sliced like a jagged knife through ailing Catholicism, cauterizing the Church’s wounds and severing the flailing limbs that had, as they matured, bruised and gouged their host body’s face and torso. The operation birth to a reformed Catholic Church and the new rite of Protestantism. gave It gave incisive answers-two quite opposed ones—to the question of clerical celibacy, so that a Protestant perspective validated the spiritual capacity of clergymen who wished to be married, while a Catholic lens reaffirmed the sacred nature of clerical celibacy.

By October 31, 1517, when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the wall of the Palest Church in Wittenberg, Martin Luther had clarified his thinking about celibacy. It was, he concluded, theologically wrongheaded, because it had been conceived as a self-imposed chore performed in the hope of currying divine favor. But the Christian God could not be cajoled by such paltry and ignoble maneuvers. God granted salvation for faith alone, and so compulsory celibacy, which Luther regarded as an attempt at a good work, was morally irrelevant to both God and the coerced celibate.

Luther was by no means an anticelibate; he believed strongly that God bestowed the gift of celibacy on some people. “This is Christ’s way,” he wrote in explanation of celibacy….Luther himself married an ex-nun, Katharina von Bora, and lavishly praised the marital state for its many blessings, especially children.—p. 113 [celibacy, Luther]

… Because of their misogyny, Luther and John Calvin, another major Protestant theologian, both considered celibacy superior to marriage, but only justified those to whom God had granted it….—p. 114 [celibacy]

BEGIN THE BEGUINE

Beguinage’s exact origins and evolution cannot be as precisely dated or documented as those of other institutions, but historians generally agree it emerged in the twelfth century. Beguines (whose name was probably a corruption Albigensians, the heretics that certain orthodox Churchmen suspected these of supporting) are easier to describe than define.  They were groups of women who dedicated themselves to chastity and poverty, pooled their possessions, and formed spiritual or residential communes.  Often they lived together, but some continued to live at home with their families. They acknowledge no formal rule and established no network with sister organizations. They worked and worshiped together and devoted themselves to the apostolic service of others. Sometimes they accepted men into their communities.—p. 115 [Begin the Beguine: Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Bok and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983] [

Celibacy, monk]

Beguinage was quite different from monasticism and other cloistered organizations whose initiates swore formal vows: chastity, poverty, and obedience. Beguines, too, cherished these precepts, but rather than pledging to them, they observed them. As one approving Belgian bishop observed. Beguines chose to be eternally celibate rather than vow eternal celibacy. They obeyed instead of swearing obedience, and they considered it more prudent to live frugally and philanthropically endow their personal fortunes rather than unloading all their properties and possessions. In fact the Beguine movement’s four pillars—as opposed to oaths–were celibacy, poverty, humility and charity, the latter executed in indefatigable service to the poor.—p. 116 [Begin the Beguine: Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Bok and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983] [celibacy, monk]

…But like the apostles, Beguines did not hide themselves away in cloisters. They lived fearlessly and piously in the world, alongside those they served: the , the ill, the orphaned, society’s unfortunates. So amorphous was the movement that some Beguines continued to live with their while others moved into communal houses or communities. Some earned the living in mainstream society, plying whatever skills they had for women’s wages. Some Beguines begged. A few enjoyed substantial incomes from personal fortunes.

Beguines were neither secular nor religious, except in their piety, which equaled that of any cloistered nun. Their professions of chastity and obedience were temporary and they continually renewed them. Theirs was a voluntary way of life, without the coercion associated with formal cloisters. The possibility of returning to worldly ways always existed, alleviating pressure on a Beguine to suffer guilt if she changed her way of life. She had free choice and did not find herself trapped in a life to which she was no longer committed

Belgian Beguines wore simple garments in plain colors, unadorned except for a penitent rope of gray-brown, undyed wool. They were poor, by birth or choice, and wanted to live with the poor they served. They inhabited the world and, unlike cloistered religious, were not forced to sever emotional ties to their blood relatives.—p. 116 [Begin the Beguine: Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Bok and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983] [celibacy, monks]

…The Albigensians taught that marriage and its sexual intercourse prevented salvation and that parents, who had by definition already fornicated, were doomed souls. Albigensianism must have influenced at least some women to look elsewhere than unlikely marriage for a satisfying life.—p. 117 [marriage, sex, celibacy]

Church politics tolled the death knell of Beguinage by attempting to regulate it. Ecclesiastical authorities were distressed by the phenomenon of unregulated communities of women springing up in urban centers throughout Northern Europe. These women worked, taught, spoke out, read the Scriptures, and selected their own spiritual guides, all without even consulting male Church officials. What were they if not uncloistered nuns?

The Church, in total agreement, clamped down on these voluntary celibates and in 1312 ordered them into cloisters. The reason for this order? Dogmatically simple, though circularly and sophistically argued: Church officials could not believe such celibate free agents as the Beguines could manage to survive chastely in the wicked world and so they must be locked up. Further- more, the private or informal vows of sexual purity they had previously sworn were now forbidden-they were directed to swear formal oaths. Then these formally avow—p. 117 [celibacy, monk, church authority]

The Church had some initial difficulty controlling all the Beguines, who were purposely scattered, uncentralized, and unassociated. But one by one unable to withstand the Churchly onslaught, the Beguinages capitulated, retreated behind walls, formalized their arrangements, and submitted to the ecclesiastical authorities.

By the fourteenth century, Church control had tightened and radically altered the nature of Beguinages. Everything from habits to entrance requirements to rites and daily rituals was prescribed. This ran counter to the essence of Beguinage, where voluntarism, informality, family ties, and life among the poor were cornerstones. Nurses, teachers, and social workers were driven off the streets and into cloisters, away from their clientele and, indeed, their raison d’être. They could no longer teach adults, only children, and behind

cloister walls, and they were not allowed to produce marketable goods. One by one, their orders folded or were transformed beyond recognition, their pursuit of apostolic life smashed by the exigencies of a rigid, ambitious, domineering Church hierarchy. In the tradition of the early Fathers, who wrote that “sin came from a woman, but salvation through a virgin,” [Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception, New York: Oxford University Press, 1976,189] these me revered virgins but hated women.

…Ultimately, the Church smashed what may have been the world’s most significant movement ever derived from women’s collective urges to lead productive, charitable, independent, and celibate lives….Beguines survived the rigors of the street and were admirably faithful to their vows chastity, but they could not survive the wrathful jealousy of the autocratic Church, which, in the name of holy chastity, snatched these apostolic angels mercy away from their needy clients and locked them away in cloisters.—p. 118 [Begin the Beguine: Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Bok and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983] [celibacy, Nun, church authority]

…Though she conceded male expertise in heading families and the Church, she was convinced women could do “all other things.”

Wherein are we so inferior to other creatures that they should term us “but women”? For what think you of this word, “but women”? but as if we were in all things inferior to some other creature which I suppose to be a man! Which I dare to be bold to say is a lie. [Retha Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983) 180]

[..]

These were dangerous viewpoints, and the Church attacked both the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the other, defiantly earthbound. In 1631, it invoked the Bull of Suppression and suppressed-killed-the Institute by expelling its three hundred teaching sisters back to England. Worse was in store for Mary Ward; she was denounced as a heretic and jailed for a short spell in a Munich convent.—p. 120 [woman, celibacy, nun]

…Ironically, cloisters often produced the very consequences the Church so feared but that the uncloistered sisters had rigorously avoided. As we will see when we consider the fate of unwillingly cloistered women, the shotgun celibacy aimed directly at them was often the first target of those who rebelled against their condition.—p. 120 [women, celibacy]

Some determined women indulged in marathon bouts of asceticism, fasting to starvation, mortifying their flesh, depriving their senses, even devising humiliations so repulsive that they could be assured few could replicate them. No Beguine or ordinary nun would dream of drinking cancerous pus or the wash water of rotting, leprous limbs.

Achieving sainthood was a serious business. Only 3,276 people who died from the beginning of Christianity to 1500 became saints, with only 87 successful candidates from 1350 to 1500. On the plus side for women, in that same period the male-to-female ratio of saints went from five to one to about two and a half to one. From 1350 to 1500-and this statistic is the most pertinent here-laywomen saints overtook males, though the greater number of clerical males gave male saints a clear lead over women in orders. For aspiring female saints, this was the most promising era ever.—p. 121 [church, celibacy, nun]

          Lapa restored the private bedroom, where Catherine imposed harsher austerities than ever before. She flagellated herself three times daily, one and a half hours each session, and tortured her flesh with an iron chain bound tightly around her hips. She spoke only to confess, slept only half an hour every second night, and that on a short, wooden board. She gave up bred and soon lost half her body weight.—p. 123 [celibacy, nun]

Now Catherine went all out in subduing what little flesh still hung on her bony frame. She relied mainly on the Holy Host for sustenance and usually swallowed only cold water and chewed bitter herbs, rarely food. Food literally sickened her, convulsing her shriveled stomach and causing her such pain that, as her confessor wrote, “anything she ingested needed to exit by the same way it entered.” Catherine’s chew-and-spit technique sometimes failed and a morsel for instance a single bean-descended into her stomach. Then she vomited back up whatever she had eaten. She was unable to do this at will, however, and so developed the agonizing habit of inserting stalks of fennel and other plants into her stomach to cause the necessary spasms. (The great St. Teresa of Avila used an olive twig for the same purpose.)—p. 124 [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell), Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)]

One day, tending a wretched and bitter woman dying of breast cancer, Catherine was revolted by the stench of the rotting flesh. So great was her revulsion that she saw it as a moral dilemma she had to resolve. Hunger and(p. 124) lust were long gone, but how, she wondered, could she conquer eve this sort of bodily sensation?  In answer, she ladled a cupful of the reeking pus and gulped it all down.

That night, Christ appeared to her. When he showed her his gouged side, was consumed by her longing to place her lips on the sacred God did not let Catherine off scot-free His consoling succor cost  her an acute chronic pain in her breast. However, from then on she no longer need food because she could not digest it.—pp. 124-125        [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell), Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)] [celibacy, nun]

Catherine’s burning ambition was to preach as a man would, and she so defeminized herself that she actually succeeded. God had primed her, assuring her it was as easy for Him to create angels as insects. With an energy incredible in one so malnourished, she flung herself into lobbying for her causes: peace and reform in the Church, the pope’s return to Rome, and a crusade against the Muslims.

Catherine was a dynamic and fearless speaker and lobbyist, lecturing and scolding leaders on every level-religious, municipal, and state-about needed reforms. She even chided the pope-Babbo or Daddy, she called him urging him to end churchly inequities or else resign and let someone else do the job. Catherine’s reputation grew until she was internationally renowned as a political and ecclesiastical authority, arguably Italy’s leading fourteenth-century statesman.—p. 125 [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell), Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)] [nun, celibacy]

After she died of starvation, Catherine’s admirers set out on canonization for her almost at once. She had achieved what she had striven for-to be the holiest of holy women, to live as a Bride of Christ in strict chastity, to deny her body physical sustenance, and to scourge it into submission to her free will.

Intelligent, resourceful, courageous, outrageous, and driven, Catherine was the quintessence of a successful Bride of Christ. The competition was stiff.  Colomba da Rieti so mutilated herself with spiked chains bound across her hips and breasts, already scraped raw and blistered from her hair shirts, that a gang of would-be rapists who stripped her were too awed to consummate the deed. Angela of Foligno quaffed water in which she had just bathed a leper’s putrefying flesh. And Bridget of Sweden, whom Christ had wed after her human husband’s death, equaled and in fact cooperated with Catherine as a diplomat, reproached her king, and nagged the pope. Ultimately, Bridget gained her own particular goal: the Bridgettine order of nuns, a feminist fantasy, directed by a woman and regulated by a simple, Spartan, and sensible rule.—p. 126 [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell), Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)] [NUn, celibacy]

…From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, 30 percent of Italian holy women indulged in near-starvation regimens….—p. 126 [nun, celibacy]

Hildegard’s forthright advice in letters included a gentle reproof to the saintly but excessively ascetic Elisabeth of Schongau. Her advice, imparted as a description of a vision, was too late, for Elisabeth subsequently died. Bodies are like fields, Hildegard wrote, and just as unseasonable downpours or neglect will ruin their crops, so excessive strain will ruin a human being.

“That pitch-black bird, the Devil,” she added, preys on sinners and people plagued by erotic desires by urging them to “trample your body underfoot through sorrows, tears, and strivings without moderation.” His diabolic suggestion is that this will expiate sin. In fact, Hildegard warned, all that happens is that the zealous ascetic weakens, sickens, and loses her zest for life, including for her holy spiritual mission, which is precisely what the Devil intended. This was, of course, the crisis point Elisabeth had already reached, and one wonders if, even at the last moment, Hildegard’s hard-hitting warning stirred the dying woman.

What a provocative view of unrestrained asceticism! And Hildegard, who heartily endorsed only one deprivation-celibacy-had more bad news. The victims of these galloping austerities were guilty of the sin of pride and thought they were better than other good people. Exactly so, but the great ascetics such as Catherine of Siena either did not read Hildegard or they disregarded her advice as applying, perhaps, to privileged, highly educated intellectuals whose minds and pens were sufficiently overpowering to win sainthood….—p. 127 [The main sources for this section are Tamara Bernstein, “Holy Hildegard: a medieval nun with ‘90s sex appeal,” The Globe and Mail, May 6, 1995; and Mathew Fox, ed., Hildegard of Bingen’s Book of Divine Works with Letters and Songs (Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1987).] [celibacy, nun]

On Easter 1676, Father Lamberville baptized the twenty-year-old Tekakwitha, now called Kateri or Catherine. This was a startling exception to the policy of withholding baptism to Indians until the moment of death or until the Jesuits were certain no relapse was likely. “One sees savages fall back almost right after their baptism-because they do not have enough courage to scorn public opinion that is the only law of these people there,” a Jesuit explained.[K. I. Koppedrayer,”The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethonohistory 40, no. 2( spriing 1993): 284-85]—p. 129 [baptism, Jesuits]

In Kateri Tekakwitha’s era, Church-ordained virginity had more than religious connotations. In the turbulence of French-Indian relations, Kateri’s purposeful and publicly sworn celibacy had dual meanings and consequences. It was her personal declaration of ownership of her body and soul, which she withheld from her native community and offered instead to the foreign god. It was also a significant victory for the Jesuit intruders, who boasted in letters French supporters how sharply Kateri’s celibacy deviated from the usual Iroquoian sexual indulgence. From both Jesuit and Iroquois perspectives, Kater’s vow of perpetual virginity made the score Jesuits one, Iroquois nothing.—p. 131 [K. I. Koppedrayer,”The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethonohistory 40, no. 2( spriing 1993): 284-85] [virgin, celibacy, Jesuits]

The Jesuits, were less enthusiastic about Kateri’s excruciating penances, which proved as much curiosity and concern as praise.  But they were intent on changing Indian sexual customs and replacing traditional family structures with French-style patriarchy.  However in a classic case of the means justifying the ends, the Jesuits overlooked Kateri’s persistent defiance of her relatives, male as well as female.  Her perpetual virginity and mystic marriage to Christ so thoroughly vindicated their teachings that they were loath to criticize how she achieve them.  The Jesuits also either ignored, or failed to comprehend, the extent to which Kateri’s virginity was as much symbol as object of her independence.  Had she responded to them as disobediently as she did to her family, they might have interpreted her insistence on chastity with less sympathy.—p. 131 [K. I. Koppedrayer,”The Making of the First Iroquois Virgin: Early Jesuit Biographies of the Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha,” Ethonohistory 40, no. 2( spriing 1993): 284-85] [virgin, celibacy, Jesuits]

…for virginity was a perennial obsession of religious thinkers and writers. The thirteenth-century Hali Meidenhad—Holy Maidenhed, in modern English—was a vitriolically antisex, antimarriage essay addressed to young virgins in the hopes of keeping them that way….(p. 133)

For the determinedly marriage-minded or the wretchedly married, Hali Meidenbad’s description of marriage must have struck a terrifying note, for it surpasses even Leo Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata in its scalding condemnation of marriage. The rare happy wife or husband, the author declares, must worry that the other will die. Most, however, hate each other, and the housewife is a miserable drudge who, when her despised mate is home, “his looking on thee makes thee aghast; his loathsome mirth and his rude behavior fill thee with horror.” On top of this he mocks her, beats her, and pummels her as if she were his slave.

Of course, sex with this beast is mandatory. The next stage of the marital purgatory is pregnancy, when the wife’s face turns” green as grass,” her eyes dark-rimmed and her head a throbbing ache. Her mouth tastes bitter and she throws up everything that enters her nauseous stomach. A more unappealing description of pregnancy and morning sickness may never have been penned and undoubtedly left a powerful impression on the women who read it.—pp. 133-134 [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)], [virgin, celibacy, sex]

…In homes where little activity could be concealed from family members, shocked readers must have recognized their parents’ marriage, their mother’s excruciating and life-threatening birthings, their father’s foul temper and heavy whip-hand. {in the 13^th century}

During this period, even the daughters of wealthy families had to share the crowded women’s quarters, where they could still not escape male relatives and servants. They could never be alone, and for those who craved solitude, life was nightmarishly public. Women were barred from some rooms and often had to sit on cushions, not chairs. They owned nothing, including themselves. They could not travel alone, study, question authority. They could not teach or nurse, manage or administer. They controlled no aspect of their life, including their future. Given this reality, Hali Meidenhad’s bleak portrayal of marriage and childbearing must have jolted many young women into serious consideration of their options, including the virginal alternative its author pressed them to adopt.—p. 134 [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)] [virgin, women]

In a suitable, serious cloister, the sky was both literally and figuratively the limit for a determinedly devout virgin. The spiritual rewards were mystical union with Christ, a place in paradise, possibly sainthood if virginity was accompanied by enough other accomplishments. The outside world, too, offered respect and prestige, and for the exceptional religious,…The convent gave European women more freedom to develop and express themselves than any other institution, including the family. Those inclined to leadership could fulfill their vocation within the confines of the cloister, though they were barred from the secular outlets open to their brothers.

Within the convent, an aspiring nun could seek the education denied her outside-in general, only women destined for the cloister could expect an education. Those with scholarly yearnings could satisfy them, whereas in worldly society, erudite women were rare and often scoffed at as aberrant. Cloisters offered instruction, access to archives and libraries, correspondence with learned theologians. (Fanatical clerics discouraged these activities, but some sympathetic father confessors were encouraging, and the cleverest nuns circumvented the obstacles.)—p. 135 [women, virgin, celibacy]

..Best of all, the convent offered a nun that elusive commodity-solitude—in the form of a room or cell of her own. That cell would be tiny, but it would contain all that she needed: a desk and a chair, a crucifix, a (p.135) bed. It would be hers alone, and for hours at a time she could pray or meditate or think or read and write to her soul’s content….However, this was the idealized view of convent life. The reality was a convent mainly inhabited by spiritually unsuited women who had entered for want of anything else to do. They regarded nunhood as a career and accepted it because they had no other.  Their parents or guardians had endowed the convent with the requisite sum, and now they had a lifetime to while away. “The majority of people are not moved… by the Evangelical conviction,” [Arcangela Tarabotti,(sections trans. By Michal Kasprzak), La Semplicita Ingannata (A simple deceit) (London: Institute of Romance Studies, 1994) 202]  lamented one nun…No wonder that from each nun’s perspective, her convent was an entirely different thing—”a career, a vocation, a prison, a refuge; to its different inmates the medieval was all these things.” [Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneires, c. 1275 to 1535 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964) 25]—pp. 135-136 [virgin, women, celibacy]

Angela of Foligno was, spiritually speaking, the merriest widow and mourner of all. Her mother, whom she considered a great obstacle in her life, died. Soon after, her husband and all her children passed away as well. Angela felt “great consolation” at their deaths, which she had prayed for, and in her own chillingly honest words, “I thought that from then on, after God had done these things for me, that my heart would always be within God’s heart, and God’s heart always within mine.”[Elizabeth Petoff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) 256]—p. 136 [women,]

…In 1215, they forbade the (p.136) creation of any new women’s orders and legislated further restrictions on convents. Official Church misogyny dictated that chaste women dedicated to the Kingdom of Heaven should live under male authority, in exile from the world. This meant nuns with a vocation for service, for example teaching or healing, had to draw clients inside the convent walls rather than expose themselves to tempting secular life on the streets.—pp. 136-137 [nun, women]

…Happily, that elusive, niggling everyday life was captured for eternity in the poems and plays of exceedingly witty and talented abbess, Spain’s Marcela de San Félix, illegitimate daughter of the great playwright and writer Lope de Vega, whose one works have been a towering presence in Spanish literature since the end of the sixteenth century.

Convent dwellers were not spared the annoyances of uncloistered existence, and Marcela noted their poverty, “the mighty hordes of lice, bedbugs, and fleas,” and the endless bickering of women confined together in perpetuity: the tensions, hypochondria, raging tempers, bossiness, rivalries, disloyalties. The competition to outdo each other in asceticism, always a major drama, provoked more strain:

So many pains, such deprivations,

you find in everything, it seems

that this sad world must end.

All are weeping, everyone sobs.

Only Sister Juana’s cheered,

because she sees her sufferings

already canonized. [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) 241]

Marcela’s ironic comments about food are especially telling, for in convent life food dominated its inmates’ thoughts. Whereas lust tormented monks and priests, food haunted nuns and was infinitely harder to conquer than sensual appetite. All fasted, but many were immoderate and starved themselves, so that the thin, pale virgins of the Church Fathers’ fantasy were actually gaunt, yellow anorectics whose emaciated bodies did not menstruate or feel or inspire the least sexual desire.—p. 137  [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)] [monk]

..Even when, during the Reformation, outsiders smashed down their doors to “liberate” them, these devout women refused to leave the place where God had called on them to serve Him.—p. 138 [virgin, nun]

…In mid seventeenth-century Venice, 3 percent of the entire population-three thousand women-were nuns, almost all from wealthy families….—p. 138 [nun]

…Weep, struggle, and protest though they might, relegating them to a nunnery was the eras conventional solution to their families’ problems.

A family’s fortune could be dissipated by inheritances split between too many sisters or squandered on too many dowries, but with birth control, infanticide, and adoption considered unacceptable remedies, nunneries were an excellent alternative. One unwilling nun wailed in a folk song:

My mother wished me to become a nun

To fatten the dowry of my sister

And I to obey my Mama

Cut my hair and became one. [Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),  77]

Inconvenient bastard daughters also cost money and created problems, but as nuns, they disappeared forever….(p.138) The dowry required of a novice was much smaller than a husband would demand, and once it was paid, the inconvenient woman became a lifelong charge on her convent, not on her relatives.

A father’s bad investments, addictive gambling, unwise political alliances, or personal extravagances might also drive him to rid himself of surplus female relatives by donating them, along with a small bequest, to the service of God. Girls in line for inheritances were also sometimes shunted off into cloisters because in the eyes of the law, a nun was dead, and a dead daughter could make no claims on her father’s estate. Kings, too, shut up rebels’ wives and daughters in convents, biblically justified punishment for their fathers’ sins.—pp. 138-139  [The main sources for this section are Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989)] [nun, virgin]

Parents also disposed of disabled, deformed, deaf and dumb girls by placing them in nunneries. Sometimes the abbesses or prioresses were loath to accept them, especially the mentally retarded or insane, but financial considerations won some over, so a nun without the least comprehension of what she was pledging gave her solemn oath of chastity, poverty, and obedience. A popular poem observed sadly:

Now earth to earth in convent walls

To earth in churchyard sod.

I was not good enough for man,

And so am given to God. [Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneires, c. 1275 to 1535 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964) 31]

Civil unrest and wars, danger and insecurity, also sent thousands of women inside the safety of convent walls. Even girls as young as five and six were cloistered, with nine being the average age in Italy. A fifteenth-century Venetian law bemoaned the legion of noble girls “imprisoned in monasteries with just tears and complaints,” [Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 182, n. 23]and the chansons de nonne, songs about reluctant nuns, was a favorite theme of medieval poetry. For these women, a parent’s peremptory “Get thee to a nunnery” condemned them to a life sentence in a wretched prison.—p. 139 [virgin, nun]

Madre Marcela was somewhat of an exception in her commitment to convent life. Until well into the eighteenth century, nunneries were dumping grounds for inconvenient women, and their lives within the dour convent interior were at best tolerably dull and hollow, at worst savagely unhappy or recklessly rebellious. Madre Marcela understood this only too well and warned in poetry against being forcibly confined to cloisters:

For the physical cell

should serve as a case

to hold the inward cell,

Where the dear Husband sleeps.

For if spirit is lacking

and there is no prayer in the soul

rather than a holy Sister

one will be but a woman enclosed.

Enclosed in what? [Madre Marcella de San Felix, “Loa to the Solitude of the Cells,” in Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (trans. Amanda Powell) Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989) 236]

Enclosed in what? To the unwilling, convents were monstrous prisons in which time served was eked out in minuscule rations, crushing tedium, terrible loneliness, and countless small cruelties. Enforced celibacy increased their angst, for they had to cope simultaneously with the sexuality they could never express or satisfy and the knowledge that marriage and family life were permanently closed to them. Release or escape were seldom options. Most endured in despairing silence, but a few left written testimonies to their desperation. Through a character in her drama, Love of Virtue, Florentine nun Beatrice del Sera groaned that “I, poor and alone in the rock [convent], put my hopes in the good of my future life.” [Weaver, 192]$#$ unable to trace Weaver.–db

Arcangela Tarabotti, trapped in her Venetian convent of Santa Anna for thirty-two years until her death, poured out her rage on paper. Her magnum opus, Simplicity Betrayed, is a scathing attack on fathers who imprison their daughters in nunneries to prevent the erosion or division of the family fortune or to indulge in sinful luxuries….These men watched delightedly as their tender little girls lisped their first words, gamboled gracefully, sang joyously like baby songbirds. Then, “guileful, weaving the web of deception, they think of nothing but to force them from sight as (p.140) as soon as possible and bury them, as if they were dead, in cloisters, for the rest of their lives, bound by indissoluble knots.” [Arcangela Tarabotti,(sections trans. By Michal Kasprzak), La Semplicita Ingannata (A simple deceit) (London: Institute of Romance Studies, 1994) 200]

…And this way of life was interminable, a sentence from which no appeal was possible. “There is an inscription over the gate of hell: ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter; on the gate of monasteries, the same should appear. Rather, it a would be more painfully appropriate to include an inscription for the dying: ‘The torments of death surround me. The torments of hell surround me.’” Ibid. 205]

Why not kill all but one male baby per family? Arcangela suggested bitterly. At least their innocent souls would fly straight to heaven. But nuns kidnapped and entombed alive will plunge downward into fiery depths to seek out their anguished fathers, for whom looking at their daughters’ accusing faces will be infinitely worse than all hell’s other torments.—pp.140- 141 [virgin, nun]

These cloistered children, even infants, were routinely trained in nunly ways and, at sixteen or younger, professed their vows.  Some did so willingly, or at least not unwillingly, but many mouthed the words on pain of beatings or worse, or because they had no alternative.  In strict convents, obedience was hammered home.  Penalties were degrading and brutal—stepping on a nun’s face, hauling her across the floor, spitting at her, ostracizing her, depriving her of food, humiliating her.  Saint Douceline whipped a seven-year-old bloody and threatened her with death because she had glanced at some convent workmen.  Escapees were usually caught and disciplined, severely beaten, shut up for years, sometimes shackled, forced to fast on bread and water, sentenced to silence or to lowly ranks in the choir or chapel.—p. 141 [Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneires, c. 1275 to 1535 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964) 29]

But the unwilling nun was, by definition, reluctant to surrender her woman’s essence just to satisfy this unwelcome requirement. As a wellborn lay- woman, she would almost certainly have grasped and accepted the need for premarital virginity. But as a nun forced into an unwelcome world in which marriage was forbidden, she could not even comfort herself with the knowledge that her chastity would ensure her eligibility for a future good marriage. From this sad perspective, what had she to lose, having already lost everything?

Even the tools available to willing nuns made no sense to their incarcerated sister: The meals were stingy enough, so why deprive herself further? Why relinquish the tiny pleasure of a feast-day candy? Why scourge herself when life was whiplash enough? And why obey a domineering mother superior whose stony heart felt no mercy for the wretchedness of her bitter, frightened, and despairing captive?

Though the majority of nuns likely remained chaste, a significant minority faltered and fell. In strict convents, this was rarer and trickier, but when abbesses themselves had been pressed into the cloister, they sometimes ran hopelessly dissolute convents. A seventeenth-century English abbess allegedly had twelve children, and a prioress dowried her daughter by selling off her convent’s possessions. The double monasteries were notorious for sexual liaisons. Bishops routinely issued edicts barring the free intercourse-in all senses-between the male and female sides.

The nuns of some slackly regulated convents had servants, ate lavish meals, adapted their habits to current fashion, carried pet lapdogs, strolled outside, or drove into the city. They received men in unsupervised visits, had sexual relations, connived at elopements. Critics charged that any man could walk into a convent and that the nuns also came and went as they wished.

The worst excesses were in Venice, where nunneries were often little more (p.143) than whorehouses. In the fourteenth century, legal action was taken against thirty-three convents that tolerated, sometimes even facilitated, fornication between nuns and their gentlemen callers….Babies were conceived and born, lovers quarreled, and jealousy abounded. The pope shut down Sant’Angelo in 1474, but it was just one of many egregiously misbehaving religious institutions.—pp. 142-143[Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneires, c. 1275 to 1535 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964)]

Certain English nuns were so free, they indulged in gadfly social lives, enjoying feasts, visits to and from friends, minstrel shows. Sexually active nuns took the initiative in their affairs, for though some Anglo-Saxon kings specifically selected mistresses from convents and chaplains preyed on their charges, English laymen were more reticent. Nuns arranged rendezvous within and without the convent and sometimes shucked off the habit for secular life with their beloved. In sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century France and Italy, young playboys haunted the convents, seeking nubile nuns as lovers.—p. 143[Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneires, c. 1275 to 1535 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964) ] [virgin, nun]

…Not surprisingly, when unwilling nuns predominated or were governed by unwilling abbesses, an overtone of worldliness and sexuality tinged the moral tone of the entire establishment….—p. 143[Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneires, c. 1275 to 1535 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1964) ] [nun, virgin]

The obsession with sex, which ranged from obliterating even thoughts of sexuality and revering virginity to elevating celibacy to the most sacred of vows, was too much at the fundament of Christian theology to ignore married people. Increasingly, the early Christian Fathers were plagued by the knowledge that, sometimes, even the most virtuous of married Christians fornicated.

Many solutions presented themselves. That elusive, one-strike-and-you’re- out virginity was redefined: after seven years of penitent celibacy, a mother( by definition a sexual being) could once again become a virgin. Old men or spiritual counselors put to earnest young men the question formerly relevant only to their sisters: Are you a virgin?

Gradually , the Church demanded temporary abstinence on specific occa-(p.145)sions: during Lent, on Sunday, if possible Saturdauy night or any night before attending mass or celebrating the Eucharist, and during the wife’s menstrual period. Even abbreviated celibacy purified the soul and cleared the channel of communication between the celibate and God. Additionally, the belief was current that abstaining during menses and holy days eliminated the possibility of conceiving lepers, epileptics, and other “tainted” offspring.

 The Fathers targeted the wedding night as well, a time of guaranteed coitus.  Celebrate with chastity, they urged, the first night for sure and, if possible, the following three or four as well. By the Middle Ages, many diocese required impatient bridegrooms to pay a fee to an ecclesiastical authority for the right to disregard this stricture. (This is probably where the myth of the jus primae noctis, and later the droit du seigneur, originated, from the Church’s—and later the seigneur’s or feudal lord’s—assumption of this novel, trick-or-treat, moneymaking scheme.

Later, the celibacy requirements were expanded. Husbands and wives had to abstain three times each year, for forty-day stretches, which amounted to about one-third of the time. Increasingly Christians began to observe these strictures. A noticeable decline in the birth rate resulted, as well as a consolidation of property in fewer hands. One beneficiary of the latter phenomenon was the Church, which naturally appreciated this development. Deep in its administrative heartland, certain wizard financial officers deduced that secular celibacy equaled ecclesiastical wealth, a formula to be cherished.&—pp. 145-146 [celibacy]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

[In India, an ideal couple should have se only one time in  life that too to beget a son.  Rest of the life they should remain celebite.  In several cases, only married couple allowed to have sex after three days rituals, or visiting the family deity, that could take several days. Finally finding auspicious time to begin family life with sex.  In few cases they have to wait several weeks, or moths and even years.  My own cousin had to wait nearly four years, though his wife lived with him under the same roof.  She will sleep everyday in her mother-in-law’s room and husband in a front room or even outside house known at Thinnai in villages, door locked inside.

Even bishops recognized that mutual agreement was essential if a celibate marriage was not to lead to sexual “misdemeanors.” When one partner, usually the wife, simply withheld her body, the bishops blamed her for the ensuing “adultery, fornication, and domestic strife.” Basil of Ancyra, however, spelled out how unwilling wives could cope with their husbands’ sexual advances: they could render themselves spiritually absent from the unpleasant event, a form of devastating mockery that often caused their true Husband, Jesus Christ, to strike their earthly mate with a flaccid penis and impotence.—&p. 147 [celibacy]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

Women had their own special reasons to welcome celibacy. With no effective birth control except abstinence, they equated sex with childbearing as much as with pleasure, and many dreaded it. Childbirth could be agonizing and often fatal: mortality rates for mothers and newborns were sky-high.  Women delivered squatting over filthy birthing stools or straw, and postpartum puerperal fever killed them in droves. Poor nutrition deformed pelvic bones so that babies were trapped in misshapen birth canals. Midwives used hooks to extract them, often in chunks. Those children who survived into adulthood faced only the same bleak poverty their parents could never escape.—&p. 150 [celibacy]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

…the Messenger travelled to Georgia. There, the electrifying itinerant preacher exhorted his audiences to follow a loving God who had created a world where gender and race were less labels. Meaningless labels.

How were his listeners to experience this world, to defy the illusory existence of gender and race? Through the power of thought, the Messenger taught, for thought, clarified through celibacy, could overcome the terrible obstacles that race and gender created. This was a unique and stern message gently told: transform society by conquering your own most basic urges.

… A sexually active leader who denied that race existed would automatically have been suspected, even accused, of encouraging black men to coerce white women into sex. The primacy of celibacy in the Messenger’s teaching strongly suggested he had no such agenda. (p.156)

Afterward, the Messenger led his mainly female followers throughout the South on a punishing, five-year trek of proselytizing. Finally, in 1917, with be handful of faithful who continued to travel with him, he settled down in Brooklyn. He also married the most devoted woman in his entourage, tall, stately Penniniah, who lived with him in obviously contented celibacy until her death. […]

About this time, the Messenger adopted a new name, the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, implying religious and military authority, the jealousy of the biblical God, and his own divinity. His flock shortened this to Father Divine and chanted, “God is here on earth today. Father Divine is his name.” Penniniah, of course, became Mother Divine.&—p. 157 [celibacy] [This information was reported by Susan Hadley, a young African-American woman sent by the country district attorney to spy on Father Divine in 1930.  Instead of exposing him as a scoundrel, Hadley had only praise for the blameless lifestyle she shared in his “heaven.”]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

As in Shaker communities, with their vitriolic, self-righteous lyrics, language in heaven was also regulated.  But Father Divine forbade his angels to use negative words and banned (rather than trumpeted) hell, Devil, and even (p.157) hello, which he believed was a corruption of hell. He originated today’s widespread greeting “Peace!” and the mantra “It is wonderful,” which dispelled negative ideas and conjured up positive thoughts that would lead, one day, to a peaceful world.&—pp. 157-158 [celibacy, monk]

[Nordi Reeder Campion, Mother Anne Lee: Morning Star of the Shaker (Hanover, London: University press of New England, 1990)]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

Like Mother Ann, Father Divine devised mechanisms to enforce celibacy by providing acceptable outlets for sublimating sexuality. Not surprisingly, given Nancy Baker’s fatal obesity, her son was so obsessed with food that he used it as a tool of ministry. The tasty fare at his bulging tables consoled, nursed, and converted, and his “Holy Communion banquets,” modeled  on the Last Super, were legendary. Decades earlier, he had inaugurated them in the South a potlucks. Later, they nourished overworked, underpaid African-Americans who packed into his dining room in such numbers that he had to host multiple sittings rather than turn anyone away. On weekends, Father Divine often spent twelve hours daily hosting them. The banquets also plumped up his angels and ensured that at least one of their earthly appetites was sated.

For Father Divine, eating was a consuming passion. Twice weekly he weighed the angels and chided any who lost weight. This, it would appear, was difficult to do. Consider a typical, Depression-era Holy Communion banquet menu: macaroni, rice, potatoes, peas, tomatoes, turnips, baked beans, turkey and pork chops, corn bread, biscuits, Graham bread, cake, pie, peaches, tea milk, and Postum.

After these feasts, the stuffed diners burst into song and prayer, witnessing and confessing, shouting and dancing and speaking in tongues. Like Mother Ann, Father Divine favored these exhausting and emotional outpourings which obviously served to dissipate any erotic feelings that gluttony had not obliterated. (p.158) […]

…In consequence, the Mission was increasingly drawn into political debates and destructive ideological battles with other black movements that deplored Father Divine’s steadfast refusal to champion blacks over whites. Yet how could he, when a fundamental part of his creed was that race did not exist?&—pp. 158-159[celibacy, monk] [Nordi Reeder Campion, Mother Anne Lee: Morning Star of the Shaker (Hanover, London: University press of New England, 1990)]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

…By 1943, when Penniniah died, Father Divine and his churches were in free fall.

In 1946, he made the situation worse by marrying Edna Rose Ritchings, aka Sweet Angel, a pretty, white, twenty-one-year-old Canadian. Father Divine justified this risky adventure by claiming that the new Mother Divine was Penniniah and the Virgin Mary reincarnated, and he likened their union to “the Marriage of CHRIST to HIS Church.”

Ah, Father Divine! At sixty-seven, he was suddenly seized by irresistible longings and reincarnated in the skin of the young George Baker so long ago shucked off. Yet from all accounts, this second marriage was as successful as the first, with the new Mother Divine thriving on the same celibate regimen as her predecessor. And celibate she was, for Father Divine preempted suspicion about any possible sexual activity by assigning a black angel to monitor her and presumably be a living witness to his heavenly wife’s intact virginity.

From a larger perspective, its leader’s questionable remarriage and, in 1965, his death certainly did not help the Peace Mission. However, the root causes of its decline lay elsewhere. By then, in a new era of sexual permissive-(p.159)ness, widely available birth control, and the civil rights: movement, celibacy was a harder sell except to those who could be convinced in was a moral imperative. The Peace Mission’s communal life seemed rigorous and restrictive, even bizarre. Its insistence on severing the parent-child bond had serious psychological and judicial implication. And though he was very old, Father Divine made the tactical error, nineteen years after he married again, of anointing his untested young wife, rather than a well-groomed protégé, to head his shriveled church.—pp. 159-160 [celibacy] [Nordi Reeder Campion, Mother Anne Lee: Morning Star of the Shaker (Hanover, London: University press of New England, 1990)]

Ironically, the twice married but never bedded Father Divine faulted Mucher Ann for having once had a sexual life. That she had terminated it, after divine revelation taught her that sex was the root of all evil, was not sufficient. From the vantage point of his own sinlessness, the virgin Father Divine judged the long-celibate Mother Ann and found her wanting. He believed her sexual experience in marriage, though short-lived and unwilling, had deprived her of immortality.—&p. 161 [celibacy][Nordi Reeder Campion, Mother Anne Lee: Morning Star of the Shaker (Hanover, London: University press of New England, 1990)]

& SECULAR CELIBATES AND AGAPE LOVE The main sources for this section are John Boswell, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New Yorki: Villard Books, 1994); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988; Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976,

CHAPTER 4

Other Major Religions and Rites

In Hinduism, with its semen-centered understanding of human physiology and spiritual development, celibacy has a crucial physical as well as spiritual dimension. Hindus regard semen as a powerful and enriching substance that should be conserved. This precept provides men with enormous impetus abstain from wasteful sex. Instead of squandering semen by indulging in uncontrolled concupiscence, they can store it as creative energy that will add to their intellectual vigor, physical stamina, and moral worth. Semen is such a powerful elixir, it even keeps men more youthful.—p. 163 [Hindu, semen, celibacy]

…In revenge, Shiva incinerates his enemy with his “third eye,” a searingly hot protuberance on the middle of his forehead. Ironically, this third eye, which becomes an instrument of destruction against Kama, the personification of lust, has been generated by the tapas of Shiva’s determined celibacy.—p. 165  [Shiva]

Traditional images of Shiva manifest his enigmatic nature. Often, this paragon not of celibacy is represented by a raised phallus in full erection. It does symbolize eroticism or sexuality, an aroused penis, but depicts, instead, a penis thickened with semen conserved through Shiva’s celibacy and raised upward so it will not spill its seed. Another popular rendition of Shiva’s celibacy adorns his head, usually a bumpy crescent or horns, or hair styled to convey a similar shape. Here, Shiva has forced his semen up through his spinal column and into the various protuberances. In these effigies, his vaunted celibacy crowns him with a hot, semen-rich coronet.—p. 165 [Siva, semen]

CELIBACY IN STAGES

Hinduism is a vastly complex religious system as rich in diversity of precepts as its Indian homeland. In fact, its differing beliefs and practices reflect India’s cultural and regional distinctions and function more as instruments of unification than, for example, Christianity and its divisive sectarianism. The Hindu pantheon accommodates hundreds of deities of varying significance, and Hindu practice is similarly varied. Unlike Christianity, which values, strives for, and wherever possible, imposes unity of doctrine and practice, Hinduism is remarkably flexible and free of the Christian concept of dissension as heresy….—p. 165 [Hinduism, heresy]

…To Hindus, these rebirths [in Christianity] are not miracles of eternal life, as they might be to Christians, but rather the terrible price exacted for wrongful deeds committed earlier.—p. 166 [rebirth] [The concept of “Re-birth” in the bible is ‘born again’ not repeated births as born again and again.—db]

          Celibate energy has a tangible physical dimension: semen.  In no other religion is the power of semen as pronounced as in Hinduism an related religious traditions….—p. 167 [Hinduism, semen, celibacy]

…Hindu temple-goers do not see marriage as a concession to human weakness but rather as a stage in the lifelong journey of spiritual growth.—p. 168 [marriage]

…Hindu ascetics do not aim to deny their bodies but to subject themselves to disciplines that enhance mental qualities and spirituality. To generate tapas, the internal heat or energy that will further their aim of liberating the soul, they often turn to yogic practice to “still the body, still the breath, and finally, to still the mind.”[Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)93]—p. 169 [sannyasi, body]

          The third suborder, rasiks, are celibate aesthetes who, unlike the other two (tyagis, nagas), live in stable temple communities and express their devotion to Lord Rama through ritual theatre….Rasiks believe their hoarded semen will convert their masculinity into feminine qualities.  This feminization is so important that many rasik imitate Rama’s wife, Sita, by putting on women’s clothing.—p. 170 [semen, celibacy]

…a metaphysical necklace constructed with three jewels.  Buddha himself was the first.  His teachings constituted the second.  The third jewel was the Order of Disciples, ordained men and women sworn to live in communal obedience to Buddhist doctrine….—p. 175 [Buddha]

Buddha acknowledged the likelihood that marital celibacy might prove unworkable. In that case, he exhorted spouses to be faithful to each other and, at the very least, strive for periods of sexual abstinence. Buddhism recognizes that most people cannot maintain marital celibacy; it tolerates sexually active marriage, sometimes even concubinage. However, at some point eroticism must come to an end, for all Buddhists who hope to achieve nirvana must adopt a life of renunciation, with celibacy at its core.—p. 176 [Buddha, celibacy]

…The all-important Buddhist concept of celibacy, therefore, can be neither defined nor understood without special reference to women’s nature.—p. 176 [buddha, celibacy, women]

…Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum for example, displays a pair of Jainist high-platformed shoes with the center of the soles hollowed out. Only the outer rims touch the ground, so the wearer crushes as few invisible organisms as possible.—p. 180 [Jainism, ahmisa]

Igjugarjuk endured “the two things that are most dangerous to us humans hunger and… cold.” His monthlong fast, doubly dangerous in the arctic chill, was broken only twice, by single mouthfuls of warm water. For the next year, he ate only certain foods. When he was exhibited to the spirits, he sat for a month, without daring to lie down, in an unprotected snow hut on an exposed ledge, with no caribou cover and only a scrap of hide to sit on. As his novitiate took place in the dead of winter, “I, who never got anything to warm me, and must not move, was very cold, and it was so tiring having to sit without daring to lie down that sometimes it was as if I died a little.” This torment continued for a month, after which Igjugarjuk no longer had the strength to stand. “I was not very much alive anymore,” he recalled, and “now so completely emaciated that the veins on my hands and body and feet had quite disappeared.” [Knud Rasmussen, “Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos,” in Report of the Fifth Thule Expeditions 1921-24, vol. 11 (New York: Arts Press, 1976) 53]

For an entire year, Igjugarjuk was forbidden to sleep with his wife. Even his food, which she cooked in a separate little pot, was segregated. No one else was permitted to share his meat. After Igjugarjuk had recovered from his ordeal and maintained strict chastity, his reward was that his village approved him as the new shaman.

Such extended celibacy in Caribou Inuit culture was exceedingly rare for any but shamans, though among ordinary folks it was fairly common in the short term….p. 184 [celibacy] [Knud Rasmussen, “Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos,” in Report of the Fifth Thule Expeditions 1921-24, vol. 11 (New York: Arts Press, 1976)]

Igjugarjuk’s rites of passage were, in their intensity, harshness, and celibate isolation, typical of shamans everywhere.  In many societies, shamans are the of only religious practitioners, and they hone their ability to communicate with the spirits through subjecting themselves, body and psyche, to grueling and terrifying experiences. The other denominator that cuts across cultures north south, east to west, is celibacy, which is always required at least for short periods and often extensively, for years. Far away from the frozen north, shamanism in the Amazon exacts similarly distinctive requirements, with strict observance of celibacy always a crucial factor in strengthening candidates for their roles as mediums between mortals and spirits.—p. 185 [celibacy] [Knud Rasmussen, “Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos,” in Report of the Fifth Thule Expeditions 1921-24, vol. 11 (New York: Arts Press, 1976)]

…Shaminism has two dimensions: bewitching or cursing, and curing, the opposite sides of the same machination. Both kinds of shaman rely on natema, a tisane of locally grown hallucinogenic substances, for the power to penetrate and interpret the supernatural world. Natema potions induce the trances that become bridges between the spirit and the real world and are so widely available that anyone can experience their wonders. As a result, about one in four Jivaro men are shamans.

Shamans must prepare themselves for their job and continually test and retest themselves to ensure their power is not waning. It often is, and so they are in a constant state of professional flux. Today’s powerful shaman may be Tomorrow’s feeble failure.—p. 185 [Knud Rasmussen, “Observations on the Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos,” in Report of the Fifth Thule Expeditions 1921-24, vol. 11 (New York: Arts Press, 1976)] [Shaman, tribe]

Shamans learn and teach by apprenticeship. They accept novices, who pay them to reveal their skills and transmit their knowledge. To initiate a novice, the shaman will vomit up a bright substance with spirit helpers embedded inside. He hacks off a piece and the novice ingests it, his stomach aching as he does so. He gulps more natema and for ten days lies on his bed dosing himself with the drug. (p.185)

To fortify himself for upcoming battles with the otherworld, the novice must rest for three months and abstain from sex. If he is too weak to observe this rule, he will be a feeble, unsuccessful shaman. After one month, he will spit up a spirit helper. Now he faces a curious decision. He will long to send this tsentsak to bewitch someone, and if he surrenders to this desire, he will become a bewitching shaman. If he stifles this impulse and instead swallows the tsentsak, he will become a curing shaman.

Celibacy plays a crucial role in the shaman’s future. A bewitcher must maintain it for five months to acquire the power to kill; a healer must abstain for the same length of time to undo the effects of the opposing bewitcher. Shamans of both persuasions require a full year’s celibacy to gain truly great power. This prolonged chastity is, however, considered an ordeal that deters many men from pursuing a career as a shaman.—p. 185-186 [Shaman, celibacy] [The Jivaro Indians: Michael Harner, “The Sound of Rushing Water,” Natural History 77, no. 6 (June/July 1968) 28-33]

…About five years after his novitiate, when he swallowed his first tsentsak, the shaman subjects himself to a sort of performance review. He attempts to bewitch a tree, then decides whether he has lost his potency. If he has, he must repeat the cycle of accumulating enough goods to pay another, more successful shaman to supply him with a new tsentsak. More rest, lots more natema, energizing celibacy…. Finally, he is again ready to make a foray into the world of the magical spirits.

Elsewhere in the Amazon, in the valleys of the Río Donachui of northern Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, where the rays of the sun activate the world beneath, the Kogi and Ika people turn to sun priests or mamas to guide them through their complicated and confusing world. Mamas do not choose their vocation, which is revealed at birth by divination. Infants born to be mamas become the wards of a mama, who removes them from their parents and takes them high into the mountains for years of preparation.

The mama and his wife raise the child in darkness, forbidden to look upon the sun or even the moon when it is full. The child sleeps by day and rises at night to eat and learn all the mama has to teach him: songs, dances, legends, divine secrets, the language known only to priests. This lasts nine years and is followed by deeper education in the mysteries of the earth and the sky.

During this period, the novice mama eats only simple, traditional food and must never taste salt. At puberty, he is first given meat.  After eighteen (p.186) years of instruction, the young man is taken outside at dawn and for the first time permitted to see the world illuminated. He is ready to receive its knowledge, the next stage in his priesthood.

Until then, the young man who has never seen sunlight has also been prevented from seeing a  woman of reproductive age. During adolescence, when he is absorbing the accumulated wisdom of his priestly mentor, the mama ensures he is never exposed to temptation. Strictest celibacy is necessary if he is to concentrate all his energy and force on assimilating the vast amount of material the mama has spent so many years imparting.—pp. 185-187 [celibacy] [The source for this section the Kogi and Ika peoples is Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) 56-57]

The acllas went into training, sequestered in convents called acllawasis, under the guidance of mamaconas, older acllas promoted to this rank. One crucial lesson was that for the rest of their lives, they must remain virginal. Four or five years later, the Inca intervened, reserving some novices for wives. Those he married, though exempted from virginity, were honored and held in awe and respect, “and Indian men and women greatly venerated them.”

Most acllas, however, were ritually wed to the Sun, and as his wives, shared his divinity and were referred to as “sainted people.” Like the Inca’s wives, the acllas were revered throughout the empire. A popular myth even held that they were so spiritual, they subsisted only on the odor of certain fruit.—p. 188[celibacy, virgin] [The Acllas of the Incan Empire: The main sources for the following section are Constance Classen, “Aesthetics and Asceticism in Inca Religion,” Anthropologica 32 (1992): 101-6]

…Judaism…teaches that because God is just, He would not subject them to pain or suffering without a divine purpose. Such a God, therefore, wants His people to experience all the wondrous aspects of the life He created, including sexuality. However, this does not imply free love. Within Judaism, marriage alone is the proper context for sex.

Once married, Jewish spouses may glory in their sexual relations within certain limits. Masturbation and intercourse during menstruation are prohibited, and the only acceptable orifice for ejaculation is the vagina. Judaism values semen as the means of procreation and consequently deplores its loss as the male’s failure to replenish the earth. Sexual intercourse is for pleasure as well as procreation, a belief stemming in part from ancient Jewish medical wisdom that regarded female and male sexual gratification as essential for conceiving a child. As well, sexual relations may continue well into old age. like the relationship between the aged Abraham and Sarah, his elderly wife

The only form of celibacy permissible is vigilantly monitored female premarital virginity. Indeed, it is essential. Everyone else should be married, reveling in what one authoritative rabbi calls “legitimate physical satisfaction.” Marriage has the added advantage of promoting the spiritual salvation of both husband and wife by keeping them from carnal sin. Marriage also advances God’s grand design of perpetuating humankind, and it sustains the family as a social unit.—p. 192 [Juew, sex, marriage] [Judaism: The sources for this section on Judaism are Gary Anderson, “Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden?  Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations the Garden of Eden,” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 2 (1989): 121-48)]

…This was so well understood that Jewish law specifically outlaws celibacy. Celibacy does more than violate Genesis 1:28’s commandment to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.” It is actually a crime akin to murder, by reducing the number of God’s souls born onto this earth. After all, the tradition was that each Jewish man should produce at least one son and one daughter. In the Middle Ages, zealous rabbinical courts exercised their powers to force bachelors into fruitful marriage by fining, expelling, or even whipping them.

Jewish interpretations of what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden demonstrate how differently Judaism and Christianity viewed sexuality (p. 192) and by extension, celibacy, Rabbinical literature sees Adam and Eve as a married couple who consummated their union in the Garden. The snake, at first an innocent bystander, sees them doing this and is passionately smitten by Eve.  This version of events in the Garden is too early to have been designed to counter a  Christian one. It simply represents Judaism’s pro-marriage precepts and explains the tone of these ancient blessings: “May you make joyful these beloved companions just as you made your creatures in the Garden of Eden…Blessed are you, O Lord, who makes bridegroom and bride rejoice.”—pp. 192-193 [Jews, celibacy] [Gary Anderson, “Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden?  Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations the Garden of Eden,” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 2 (1989): 121-48), 122]

Yet despite their religion’s wholehearted endorsement of marriage, some Jews were attracted to celibacy. Much Talmudic literature deals with Noah’s and Moses supposed celibacy, and spokesmen for medieval Hasidism, an orthodox Jewish sect, attempted to reconcile the command to procreate in marriage with their misogynist, often demonic views of women. As Jews, they could not proscribe sexual intercourse, but they could and did demand it be performed without lust or physical pleasure. Similarly, they instructed men to care for their wives only as instruments for procreation. An analogy was the rhetorical question about the merchant who needed his horse to ride to market: “Should he therefore love the horse?” Some Hasidim carried this misogyny so far that it led them to celibacy, but this has never been anything but a Judaic anomaly.—p. 193 [Jews, celibacy]

…But in direct contrast with Christianity, Judaism tolerates no monasticism, and the notion of celibacy remains a foreign and unwelcome one. As one ancient rabbi expressed it, “We are holy and more virtuous for we bear children and multiply seed in the world.”—p. 193 [Jew, monk, celibacy] [Gary Anderson, “Celibacy or Consummation in the Garden?  Reflections on Early Jewish and Christian Interpretations the Garden of Eden,” Harvard Theological Review 82, no. 2 (1989): 121-48) 122]

This exuberant delight in marital love stems from the Koran and its story of creation. Allah created man from dust, earth, drops of semen, and congealed blood, which He, too, possessed. The knowledge that semen was also a divine attribute led to the view that marriage is the highest good. In fact, Muhammad expressly opposed celibacy and urged all men capable of marriage to marry.—p. 194 [Islam, celibacy, marriage]

…The mystery of sexuality is equally blessed, the culmination of God’s work. Even orgasms are wonderful phenomena, and Islam has succeeded in integrating “the orgasm into the transcending self.”—p. 194 [Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985) 7, 8, 247] [Islam, sex]

…The Prophet, in fact, regarded single people as the lowest ranked of all, whereas “one who marries has already guarded half of his religion, therefore he should fear Allah for the other half.”….—p. 194 [Sayyid M. Rizvi, Marriage and Morals in Islam (Richmond: Vancouver Islamic Educational Foundation, 1990) 29] [Islam, single, marriage]

CHAPTER 5

Celibacy to Conserve Semen

So strict is the Catholic prohibition against onanism casting sperm upon the ground, as the biblical Onan did-that on the one hand, nocturnal emissions have always been a major concern, while on the other, masturbation, coitus interruptus, and most birth-control devices other than abstinence are unmitigated sins. The Church even refuses the marriage sacrament to men who cannot ejaculate. Eunuchs, therefore, may not marry. For the same reason, nonconsummation because of impotence constitutes grounds to annul a marriage.—p. 197 [semen, marriage]

Hippocrates had a different message for men, whom he advised to retain their semen, which energized their bodies. Sexual activity, though salutary for women, was detrimental to men because it drained away their semen….

The practical significance of this was not entirely clear, because what was beneficial for women might be detrimental for men. In fact, Hippocratic medical wisdom merely reflected Greek contempt for women as alien creatures who needed domestication-marriage and motherhood-by their male superiors. In practice, this dichotomy presented no real problems. Male health was the top priority, so men initiated sex or chose celibacy on the basis of their personal needs and beliefs. If they concluded that sex— the ejaculation of sperm-was beneficial to their health, they engaged in it….—p. 198 [semen, celibacy, sex]

Nocturnal emissions, the inadvertent wet dreams….—p. 199 [semen]

Monastic wisdom (based on long experience) held that two or three nocturnal emissions per month were morally acceptable, mainly because they seemed to be unavoidable. This religious perspective, of course, did not factor in sperm’s value as an essential bodily fluid.—p. 199 [monk, semen]

Davy [a imaginary character by the author] was, the literature assured him, “thoughtless, rash and unwilling to be advised.” [Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian Purity: An Ethonohistorical Analysis of Jacksonian America,” American Journal of Sociology 84, sup. (1978)231, citing Alcott’s$ [cannot be tranced—db] young Men’s Guide]If only he would listen! If only he could grasp the danger and accept that he must modify his coffee-guzzling, spice-jolted, homoerotic life. From the dangerous age of adolescence, he should spend fifteen years in celibate Christian courtship, preparatory to marriage. When he finally wed his frigid, Very Good wife, he could indulge himself sexually with her about twelve times per annum. More frequent ejaculations put him at risk of early death because each ounce of lost semen equalled four ounces (thirty-six fewer than Tissot’s estimated forty) of precious blood. Nor was this once-monthly ration a privation, so boring did marital sex become after husband and wife “become accustomed to each other’s body, and their parts no longer excite an impure imagination.” [Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonaian America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980)119]—p. 204 [semen]

Pure Books on Avoided Subjects [by The American Male Purity Movement], as some booksellers discreetly advertised them, approached this most delicate of subjects from male and female perspectives: What a Young Boy Ought to Know, What a Young Man Ought to Know, What a Young Husband Ought to Know, and What a Man of 45 Ought to Know were the male offerings, written by Lutheran minister Sylvanus Stall. Masturbation was denounced as a terrifying curse that caused weakness and ill health, “and in extreme cases imbecility and insanity…. as the inevitable result.” [The main sources for this section are Michael Bliss, “Pure Books on Avoided Subjects,” Historical Papers (1970): 89-108; ]Masturbators, lacking strong bodies, faced consumption and certain death.—p. 205 [semen, sex]

Even marriage could not be regarded as a license for sexual expression. After all, wedding or not, the groom had only so much semen, and when that was gone, he faced physical erosion. Once a week was the maximum permissible, once a month was better, and best of all was celibacy except for sexual coupling for the sake of conceiving children. Though men would have difficulty with this, God in his wisdom had made women passive and sexually indifferent, ruling out mutually irresistible passion. […]

At age forty-five or thereabouts, sex was to be completely terminated. Enough semen had been lost, and any further droplets could “ill be spared.” Fortunately, sexual desire would wane and die, so celibacy would be fairly easy. The new celibates would feel “the grateful sense of relief [that] the stress of the sexual impulse is gradually passing away.” [The main sources for this section are Michael Bliss, “Pure Books on Avoided Subjects,” Historical Papers (1970): 89-108; ]—p. 205 [celibacy, semen]

…The Pythagoreans and Kroton medical-school thinkers located semen in the brain and spinal cord, which means discharging it would specifically undermine those two vital areas of the body.  Democritus’ pangenesis theory took a ubiquitous perspective and saw sperm in all body parts, so that excreting it would dilute a man’s overall strength. The third major concept was hematological and propounded by writers from Aristotle to Galen. Sperm was created from the best elements of the blood….—p. 210 [semen]

…Ironically, the athlete had only to control his urges for women and boys until the race was done, when he was given free rein to indulge his lust. The average Greek citizen neither aspired to celibacy nor admired it, except as an instrument to hone the state’s finest sportsmen. Champions such as Cleitomachus, who abhorred sex at any time, were exceptions to their culture’s rule. So were certain philosophers and their acolytes, who idealized abstinence….—p. 211 [sex, Greek]

          This ideology of the “spermatic economy”—budget your sperm and spend it wisely….—p. 211 [semen]

…Andy Pettitte of the New York Yankees pledge the Life Athlete Commitment, which reads:

1. I will do what is right, even when it is difficult.
2. I will give myself only to that special person that I marry as my partner for life.
3. I will respect the lives of others, especially the unborn and the aged.
4. I will not quit or make excuses when I fail.  I will try again.—p. 214 [The main sources for this section on modern sports are Lisa Alther, Kinflicks (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976)] [celibacy, sex]

…Several studies, including the first one, conducted in 1968 by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, have investigated the relationship of sex and performance and have concluded that there probably is none, However, the notion of moral purity or at least superiority may in fact boost an athlete’s self-esteem and hence motivate him to excel. By the same token, knowledge of an opponent’s ascetic regimen may spook a less-disciplined rival into underperforming as a form of conceding moral defeat.

The abstinent-champion theory is both die-hard and long-lived. Coaches still advocate it because they believe sex devours energy and debilitates, reducing concentration, muscle strength, aggressiveness, and the will to win. They also rate premarital sex and masturbation as fractionally more enervating than marital sex. The more strenuous and competitive the sport, the more its coaches tend to hold this view. Boxing, weight-lifting, football, and soccer coaches are much more likely to enforce celibacy than those overseeing yachters and golfers….

….Only England’s coach, Glenn Hoddle, stood alone and, in the name of creating a happy atmosphere, encouraged pregame sex by flying in wives and girlfriends. This was in striking contrast to 1966, when England enacted the celibacy rule—and won its first and only World Cup title.—p. 215 [Tommy Boone and Stephanie Gilmore, “Effects of sexual intercourse on maximal aerobic power, oxygen pulse, and double product in male sedentary subjects,” Journal of Sport Medicine and Physical Fitness 35, no. 3 (September 3, 1995): 214-17] [celibacy, sex]

…In Europe and South America in particular, soccer players are akin to deities, often surpassing movie stars and other celebrities….—p. 215

…Sex takes time and energy and is often associated with alcohol and late nights, or in Casey Stengel’s words. “It isn’t sex that wrecks these guys, it’s staying up all night looking for it.”….[Tommy Boone and Stephanie Gilmore, The Complete Runner,(Mountain View: World Publications, 1974) 159]—p. 216 [sex]

…At least one stud found coaches consider women vulnerable to sexual encounters because they experience them as emotionally draining. Men, on the other hand, suffer physical consequences. The very existence of their semen, therefore, holds men hostage to its extraordinary power.—p. 216 [semen, women, sex]

…For these sportsmen, celibacy is both discipline and ritual. Psychologically, it empowers them, and they experience this physically. It also lends a certain élan to their lives, an idealism and superiority of purpose appropriate for folk heroes. The historical theories of the power of conserved semen are now mere echoes, but in their temporary and self-conscious celibacy, these men have embraced the legacy of the legendary athletes of yesteryear.—p. 216 [celibacy, semen]

…These inheritors of Muscular Christianity (p.216) hold each other’s hand with fraternal chastity and mutually pledge to life-times of virtue and sexual purity.—pp. 216-217 [celibacy]

Indian….Wrestlers—pahalwans—are a kind of brahmacharin, ascetic, righteous, and extraordinarily healthy men devoted to seeking a level of selflessness that will permit them knowledge of pure truth. However, even more than other brahmacharins, pahalwans are deeply concerned about losing semen, which Hindus believe contains the essence of life. Even the loss of 2 slight dribble during involuntary nocturnal emissions alarms pahalwans. Semen is fundamental to their athletic vocation and they shudder at losing one drop, which they equate to sixty drops of blood. It is not just one more fluid but rather a distillate of blood, marrow, bone, and other bodily substances and so incorporates within itself the very nature of human existence.—p. 217 [The source for this section is Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)] [semen, celibacy]

The actual wrestling takes place in an akhara, a simple gymnasium…. are free to all men but out cases and Muslims and, of course, women, who are forbidden to enter the premises…..—p. 218[The source for this section is Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)] [Islam, women]

…Ironically, the most startling is of a tiny, gnarled, jug-eared old man lying naked next to a haremlike procession of lovely, trusting, birthday-suited, and very young women: elder statesman Gandhi, testing his vow of brahmacharya.

Whether we see this as salacious old goatery or delightful innocence, it is an unforgettable introduction to India’s complex ideal of brahmacharya. Brahmacharya means much more than mere abstinence. Traditionally urged on married couples as, in Gandhi’s words, the “only noble and straight method of birth control,” [Mahatma Gandhi,(trans. Mahadev Desai)  An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiment with Truth (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1959) 112] it embodies a lifestyle of intense self-control in which the rational mind reduces all the carnal appetites to nothingness….—p. 219 [Gandhi, celibacy]

….Gandhi lamented that, as a sexually active husband and then a brahmacharin plagued by nocturnal emissions he had spilled so much semen that he regarded himself as “an incomplete brahmachari…. This shortcoming of mine is known to the world.”[Sudhir Kakur, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)105, citing Gandhi’s letter to a confidante, Prema Kantak]—p. 220 [semen, Gandhi, celibacy]

But awareness of semen is only part of the brahmacharin’s path to realization of truth. The steps along the way are simple to enunciate, murderously difficult to master. Gandhi’s instructions for achieving it are fourfold. First. understand that brahmacharya is necessary. Second, gradually control all the senses, especially through fasting and a careful diet that must never include animal flesh. Third, consort only with clean companions, both human and literary. Lastly, pray.—p. 220 [Gandhi, semen, celibacy]

…A true brahmacharin will not even entertain erotic thoughts. That is not to say such fantasies will not insinuate themselves. The trick is to refuse to focus on them. “Victory will be ours in the end,” Gandhi wrote, “if we non-co-operate with the mind in its evil wanderings.” Hence his controversial brahmacharya experiments.—p. 220 [$Reference cannot be traced for this quote—db. But could be from Judith Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1989)] [celibacy, sex, semen]

….Leo Tolstoy’s metamorphosis in The Kreutzer Sonata…

Brahmacharya, regrettably absent in the Tolstoy marriage, greatly improved the Gandhis’. Kasturbai was compliant and the Mahatma stopped blaming her for sabotaging his resolve to be celibate. “I could not steal into my wife’s heart,” the formerly autocratic husband wrote, “until I decided to treat her differently than I used to do, and so I restored to her all her rights by dispossessing myself of any so-called rights as her husband.”[Bapu’s Letters to Mira, (1924-1948) (Ahmedabad: Navjivan Pres, 1949), September 26, 1927, 46]—p. 222 [celibacy, Gandhi]

At one time or another, onions, salt and other condiments, sugar, dates, currants, and milk were all banished from the ashram kitchen. Inhabitants of the ashram spent what seemed to some of them a disproportionate time discussing food, namely what at any given time they could or could not eat. “Sometimes I think it would be better if we just think about it at all,” one of them remarked.[Millie G. Polak, Mr. Gandhi: The Man (London: Geroge Allen & Unwin Let., 1931) 83-84] Fasting was also frequently observed, an important prop in the battle to quell sexuality.—p. 222 [Gandhi]

…he routinely violated the customary brahmacharya precaution of avoiding temptation by avoiding women. Instead, he actually invited it by his ongoing intimacy with women he welcomed into his ashram and by the quagmire of emotions he stirred in their hearts.

For instance, Gandhi liked to stroll with his favorite young women, his draped around their shoulders. The jealousy among his devotees was ferocious, and they tallied scores and quarrelled among themselves. An outstanding new disciple, Prema Kantak, hurt by the other girls’ taunts- “Bapuji does not put his hands on your shoulders!”-was devastated to discover the ashram rule: Bapu could only embrace girls under sixteen years. She was seven years over the age limit. She confided her pain to Gandhi, who advised her to ask permission from the ashram superintendent. Prema recoiled. “Why should I hanker after your hand so much that I have to go and get permission?” she snapped.

But one night she heard Gandhi fall down near the toilets, weak from diarrhea due to a food experiment. Prema supported him back to bed, his limp body sagging against hers. Afterward, the ashram rule was forgotten and Bapu often took his evening walk with Prema, who once kissed his hand and cried, “The hand that has shaken the British throne is resting on my shoulders!” [Millie G. Polak, Mr. Gandhi: The Man (London: Geroge Allen & Unwin Let., 1931) 111-12]—p. 223 [Gandhi]

 Like her rivals–and they were legion-Prema suffered the anguish of competing for the beloved Bapu’s favor. In Intimate Relations, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar analyzes the nature of Gandhi’s tactics. He strove to intensify the intimacy between himself and these special women but immediately withdrew if one of them responded by requesting a closeness he felt crossed an invisible line he had drawn between them. He then tried to control the rebuffed woman’s pain or withdrawal from him so the relationship would continue. The consequence of this constant emotional turmoil, in the women and sometimes even in Gandhi himself, was that the emotional ambience in the ashram often reached fever pitch and produced frequent explosions. […]

Some of these adult women experienced their lives differently. Prema left to found another ashram only after years of emotional turmoil, victim of Gandhi’s relentless manipulations—gentle, mocking rejection alternating (p.223) with cajoling invitation. She accused him of emotional seduction, luring people into his trap. Gandhi denied her charge, but added that even if he were to do such a thing, she should remain self-confident. [Pushpa Joshi, Gandhi on Women (Collection of Mahatma Gandhi’s Writings and Speeches on Women), (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1988)]

Another casualty was Madeline Slade, an aristocratic Briton who descended on the ashram, and Gandhi, with unstoppable enthusiasm. Before long Gandhi began to respond, and for most of their twenty-four years together, he and Mira,[Bapu’s Letters to Mira, (1924-1948) (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1949)]  as she was called, were, except for their chastity, much like ill-fated lovers, When the tensions became unbearable, Gandhi would send her away. Mira, unable to endure these heartbreaking episodes that Gandhi preferred to think of as spiritual struggles, would suffer nervous would breakdowns. Then she reappear at the ashram, only to be banished once more. […]

So went Gandhi’s exquisitely refined handling of the women in his ashram harem. His was brahmacharya-style womanizing. Prema and Mira led the pack of his favorites, both intelligent and resourceful women he would/could not bring himself to relinquish or rather liberate from the steely bonds of his love. This, despite the cost to their-and certainly his own-serenity. And to his wife’s, for feisty, loyal, and loving Kasturbai had to witness it all, and despite her own intimacy with Gandhi, she remained rightfully jealous of all her husband’s women.

Gandhi’s understanding and practice of brahmacharya was clearly unorthodox. Though committed to controlling his bodily senses, he felt no need to restrain his passionate emotions. He permitted himself intense relationships with many women and never attempted to sublimate his feelings, which he openly reflected upon and articulated. Instead, he cultivated and kindled love in the yearning breasts of a succession of appealing acolytes, then dampened it down whenever it threatened to rage out of control.

Gandhi’s famous experiments with young, naked women were actually not as dangerous as his relations of the heart, which kept the ashram’s emotional climate at boiling pitch and promoted bickering resentment and divisive rivalry. Gandhi did not see it that way. Instead, he boasted to Prema about (p.224) how he had resisted the temptation to make love with thousands of women who had lusted after him. God had saved the women and Gandhi, too.

Gandhi considered his sexually unconsummated trysts as feats of moral strength that compared favorably with those of men who had the same inclinations but merely avoided women. Other brahmacharins controlled only their bodies and not their passions and were filled with lust even though they shed I no semen. He, on the other hand, practiced purity of thought as well as sexual abstinence.—pp. 223-224 [Gandhi, celibacy]

…Ramananda, who successfully tested himself with two lovely temple prostitutes. Alone with them in an isolated garden, Ramananda would strip them, oil and bathe their bodies, then dress them again, all the while remaining unaroused. And long ago, the philosopher Viswanatha had managed, by concentrating on his guru’s instructions, to lie chastely with his wife.—p. 225 [celibacy]

Seen in this light, Gandhi’s experiments seem like twentieth-century repetitions. They began after he complained of nightly “shivering fits” and requested that various young women—teenaged virgins or newlyweds— sleep next to him to warm him. Sushila Nayar, who later became his physician, masseuse, and secretary, was unaffected by her nights next to the man they affectionately called Bapu. But Abha Gandhi, Bapu’s great-nephew’s six- teen-year-old wife, had a different experience. She had to remove her clothes so Gandhi could judge whether he, like Ramananda, was sufficiently chaste to be unaffected by her nakedness. Abha’s husband was so distressed he offered himself in his wife’s place; he, himself, would keep the old man warm at night. But no, Gandhi wanted Abha for his brahmacharya experiment.

Another teenager, distant cousin Manu Gandhi, bathed and shaved Gandhi, slept with him, monitored his physical condition during his fasts, and gave him enemas. Manu reveled in the status these intimacies earned her and the edge she acquired over other women jockeying for position in Gandhi’s affections. Gandhi, meanwhile, congratulated himself on his unresponsiveness to the warmth of her body next to his and the sensation of her hands as she ministered to him. Manu headed the list of nubile young guinea pigs in the brahmacharya experiments. [Anthropologist Alter, 61, believes the most striking feature of Gandhi’s experiments is “their utterly banal character.”—p. 225 Joseph S. Alter argues persuasively in “Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India.” (Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 45-66] [Gandhi, celibacy]

….Gandhi’s was a unique, personal version of Indian brahmacharya, in which the power of the mind dominates the body. Sexual abstinence is only one dimension. Because self-control is paramount, testing to see whether that control is truly in place makes logical sense. Gandhi certainly justified his demand for alluring young bedmates on these grounds, though from any perspective, he was guilty of exploiting them. His emotional abuse of Kasturbai, Prema, Mira, and a throng of other wronged women was, however, most egregious of all.—p. 226 [Gandhi, celibacy]

…Living in intimacy with as many of them as he did, including his wife, Kasturbai, he grew to empathize with them on many issues. He remarked, for example, that mentally, he had become a woman. He argued strongly against marriage between old men and young women, so common in India, and suggested debauchery as an apt word to describe it.—p. 226 [Gandhi]

….He was not advocating celibate marriage but rather a desexualized relationship in which women’s primary function was motherhood. Indeed, in idealizing motherhood, perhaps because he had so adored his own young mother, Gandhi implicitly denied women’s sexuality, despite daily evidence of it at the ashram.—p. 226 [Gandhi, celibacy]

…Gandhi’s unusual version of brahmacharya, however, is instructive not so much as a model for abstinence but as an example of a tool for political action….—p. 226 [Gandhi, celibacy]

…Joseph S. Alter argues persuasively in “Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India.” (Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 45-66; —p. 227

British imperialism, with its lingering remnants, has its own typical culture. In it, powerful white men have defeated and triumphed over Indian men, whom they then characterize as effete and impotent, unable to protect themselves or their women from a superior force. This imperialism has, as well, a distinctly sexual thrust. Virility is transmogrified from a metaphor for political and cultural power into an actual physical attribute of the conquerors: British men are more virile than the vanquished Indians. The measure of power, Alter argues, was both literally and figuratively a man’s capacity to spend semen. For the imperialist, spilling semen has a diametrically opposite meaning to the Indian’s: the one empowers, the other enervates.

Carrying the real-life metaphor further, the British contempt for Indian men extended to Indian women, whom they eroticized and had their sexual way with, through rape, seduction, prostitution, concubinage, even intermarriage. Sperm was spilled wantonly, and the conqueror measured his worth by a body count of women defiled.—p. 228 Joseph S. Alter argues persuasively in “Celibacy, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India.” (Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 1 (February 1994): 45-66 [British, India, semen]

“My life is more suffering than almost any other kind, is it not, God? Wrote Florence Nightingale, in despair at the futility of existence under her parents’ roof….—p. 245 [Monica Baly, ed., As Miss Nightingale Said…., Florence Nightingale Through Her Sayings—A Victorian Perspective (Lonon: Scutari Press, 1991) ]

At the end of her long life, Florence had not a single regret about her decision to nurse rather than marry. She was also very firm about advising other women “to keep clear of … the jargon, namely, about the ‘rights of women,’ which urges women to do all that men do, merely because men do it… and the jargon which urges women to do nothing that men do, merely because they are women…. Surely woman should bring the best she has, whatever that is, to the work of God’s world, without attending to either of these cries.” [Elspeth Huxley, Florence Nightingale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975) 190]

To the end, her ever-active, analytical mind was impatient with ideology and rote thought. Personal rebellion had been the price of her success, but when she died, aged ninety, she had enormous accomplishments to her credit.

 Apart from these successes, Florence was admired by and corresponded with the highest in the realm, including Queen Victoria. She measured her friendships and her life in goals achieved-nothing else mattered. Life was not a journey but a destination. This was true from her earliest years, she had refused to be submerged within a stifling Victorian marriage and, in defiance of her genteel world’s natural order, embraced celibacy and freedom.—p. 248 [celibacy, women]

CHASTITY WITH AN AGENDA BRITISH SPINSTERS STRIKE AGAINST SEX

In Lysistrata, as we have seen, a legion of battle-weary soldiers’ wives unite to force their husbands to cease hostilities. Their weapon, withholding sex until the bellicose men lay down their swords, is celibacy at its strategic purest, employed in the great cause of peace.

In the late nineteenth century, thousands of British women staged their own real-life version of Lysistrata. Their agenda was quite different from the Greek model they were all unmarried, and they celebrated their spinster- hood as a deliberate strike against women’s inferior position.

In feminist writer Lucy Re-Bartlett’s ringing words, “In the hearts of many women today is rising a cry somewhat like this . . . I will know no man, and bear no child until this apathy is broken through-these wrongs be rights…. It is the silent strike’ and it is going on all over the world.” [Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985) 90]—p. 249 [celibacy, British]

…the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act, women could keep their wages and no longer had to surrender them to their hus- (p.249)bands, so the idea of salaried employment was far more alluring than it had been.

These changes were not gifts from a munificent government. They were the outcome of decades of agitation, mostly by middle- and upper-class women, against their oppression. Many of them had also spoken behalf of the millions of their working-class sisters, whose oppression was manifested differently but stemmed nonetheless from the domination.—pp. 249-250 [British, women]

…What was still so galing, however, was that in marrying, a woman merely exchanged her father’s authority for her husband’s. True, the 1882 (revised and upgraded) Married Women’s Property Act permitted {in England} women to own property in their own right, but in other crucial areas, they remained legally subservient. All too often, the transfer of subservience from father to spouse proved a sorry bargain.—p. 250 [woman]

Hadn’t Florence Nightingale earlier warned that women who marry “must sacrifice all their life… behind his destiny woman must annihilate herself”? She, like so many other women of her class, remained single-and celibate- to guarantee the personal independence she needed to fulfill her ambitions.—p. 250[Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985) 88] [marriage, celibacy, woman]

Thus a considerable slice of late-nineteenth-century celibacy was the deliberate choice of frustrated, rebellious, and politically astute middle-class women. Sexual intercourse with a man, they believed, was a surrender of judicial and (despite the 1882 legislation) property rights, and an abdication of personal independence. They seized on celibacy as a strategy to improve the female condition and, with quiet determination, earned their own living and simply refused to marry.—p. 251 [celibacy, women]

…Independent or not, decent women did not wander about alone or eat alone….—p. 251 [women]

…Beatrice, who was intensely attracted to the much older powerful, and prosperous Chamberlain, is an excellent case in point. Despite her feelings, she was frightened off because she recognized he was a dominant personality: “If the fates should unite us (against my will) all joy and lightheartedness will go from me. I shall be absorbed into the life of a man whose aims are not my aims; who will refuse me all freedom of thought in my intercourse with him; to whose career I shall have to subordinate all my life, mental and physical.” [Beatrice Potter Webb, (ed. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie), The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 1 (London: Virago, 1982)  111]—p. 253 [women]

…Sexology’s founding fathers, England’s Havelock Ellis, Germany’s Iwan Bloch and August Forel, stressed the innate biological differences between men and women. [Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985)] In Ellis’s words, “women’s special sphere is the bearing and the rearing of children, with the care of human life in the home. Man’s primary sphere remains the exploration of life outside the home, in industry and inventions and the cultivation of the arts.” [Havelock Ellis, Sonnets with Folk Songs from the Spanish and Man and Woman (Waltham Saint Lawrence: Golden Cockerel Press, 1925) 447]

With this observation of the status quo cloaked in scientific garb, Ellis proceeded to extrapolate conclusions. One was that ideal sexual relations would be between male dominance and female submissiveness. Another was that the ideal female, a paragon of Motherhood….—p. 254 [women]

Women, too, bought into the Motherhood ideal. Some felt it validated the roles they had chosen or that had been chosen for them. Others were persuaded that sexology was scientific truth and so believed the conclusions its thinkers so convincingly reported.—p. 254 [sex, women]

These conclusions clashed with feminist beliefs, particularly the silent strike, the voluntary spinsters’ movement in which women took control of their lives by refusing to surrender their rights to husbands. Censuring spinsters became the keynote of antifeminist attacks….

In later years, charges of lesbianism and frigidity, both caused or worsened by spinsterhood, bolstered the attacks on single, independent women….—p. 255 [women]

In the manipulative hands of the sexologists and their unlikely Motherhood allies, the celibacy that women seeking independence had once embraced with such delight and firm purpose was now portrayed as sullied and suspicious, a witch’s mantle for freaky madwomen or a masquerade for reviled lesbians. Society still demanded virgin brides, but their virginity was their supreme offering to a husband who would maneuver them through the rest of their life….—p. 255 [virgin, sex, women]

Ch 7 Celibacy as Womanly Duty.

Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

CELIBACY AS A GUARANTEE FOR MARRIAGE CHASTE BRIDES GUARANTEE PATERNITY

When and where was the concept of celibacy first articulated? Did it originate as a shamanistic instrument later adopted by ambitious hunters and warriors? Or was it first imposed on nubile women to guarantee their purity for the men they would later breed with? The story of celibacy, in the guise of virginity and chastity, is shrouded in the mists of eons past. Though the hunger to know is too urgent to dismiss, we can only suckle it on pap distilled from prehistoric gleanings, glimpses, and guesses and hope that some true nourishment seeps in.

Myriad pieces of data confirm the near-universal subordination of women from the earliest times. Despite consoling myths about great matriarchies, it is a rare society where women are equal to their men. One study of over eight hundred societies reveals how overwhelmingly males dominate leadership positions, including in their kinship groups,….What is certain is that, unlike hunter/gatherers and horticulturists, most stable agricultural societies base social continuity and internal stability largely on female celibacy-virginity in girls, chastity-cum-fidelity in wives-the best guarantee for a successful genetic transfer.&—p. 257 [celibacy]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

Less rare is the societal standard that accepts or even expects premarital sex with the intended spouse, with pregnancy followed swiftly by marriage….—&p. 258 [sex, marriage]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

However, many societies that tolerate a lack of chastity among lower-ranking women demand premarital virginity of women of higher status. This class element is complex. It operates partly to reinforce more stringent moral standards on members of its female elite, thereby emphasizing their superior moral worth. Paradoxically, the opposite is often true for its males, who are permitted or even encouraged to indulge in sexual experimentation.—&p. 258 [class, social, sex, chastity]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

[In India Chastity of a queen guarentee the vigour and safety of the King.  It is a must.  To defeat a king violate the chastity of the queen, as happened the case of Jaladara to be killed by Vishnu—db]

…Virginity in brides, however, is the religious ideal of the great majority of societies. [Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China,” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88) 287]—p. 258 [virgin]

Here is a brief breakdown of the most important considerations underlying this fixation on virginity. First, the bride’s chaste maidenhood carries several important guarantees for her husband: (1) that the children she conceives-at least the first one-will be his; (2) that she has not dishonored him by allowing another man to take her maidenhead and have intimate knowledge of her body; (3) that by refraining from sexual activity, she has demonstrated the likelihood of marital fidelity; (4) that by obeying the dictates of her relatives, her culture, and/or her religion, she has proved she is dutiful and likely to submit as well to her husband’s authority; and (5) that by coming to her husband unburdened by a child, her dowry and future labor will be devoted exclusively to the new family he and she have just found. (p.258)

The bride’s family and in-laws also benefit, because (6) her virginity enables her family to negotiate favorable marriage terms; (7) she has shamed own neither her own nor her husband’s family by acquiring a bad reputation; and (8) she has not violated her religion’s strictures against premarital sex, bringing down on her family’s head the wrath of offended deities.&—p. 258-259 [virgin, women]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

This is why, of course, most societies that insist on maidenly virginity tacitly acknowledge that it is unnatural. They do this variously. They devise stringent methods to enforce it-foot-binding and female genital mutilation are examples. They inculcate the principle of virginity into their youth or preach it as a religious tenet. They punish the unchaste, often severely. They marry girls off when they are still too young to be lustful. Lastly, they reward virgins and/or their families. Young women who sacrifice immediate, intimate pleasure may gain considerable economic payback: husbands who will support them, who may even pay-to their families–a hefty bride price for the virtuous young bride.

This trade-off has its ironic dimensions. The indefatigable sexuality that virgins must suppress was part of an evolutionary strategy to attract the strongest, most productive males….&—p. 259 [virgin]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

This social construct places an enormous responsibility on a woman’s shoulders. If, in a single weak or willful moment, she surrenders to her physical nature, she can destroy her future or shame her family.—&p. 258 [women]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

…They [Chaina] had defiled the traditional culture of mianzi, honoring one’s family’s prestige.—p. 260 [Chaina, famioy]

In a curious twist of values, materialism sometimes prevails over mianzi [honoring one’s family’s prestige in China]. Then a young man’s family resorts to “mother’s-lock” sex, a common form of entrapment. This happens when they calculate the cost of honor versus dishonor and opt for the latter. A mother will lock her son in a bedroom with his girlfriend, assuming, and desiring, the worst. Once this happens, the ensuing wedding will be an economical affair. Just as important, the mother-in-law will forevermore taunt her daughter-in-law about her indiscretion, thereby controlling the younger woman.&—p. 260 [Chaina, women]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

…the Greeks did not value celibacy, but their daughters had to remain virginal…. (p.260) If she was caught, the young woman was in terrible trouble. Fathers were obliged to obliterate all reminders of such shameful daughters from the household. Selling them into slavery was a common solution….&—pp. 260-261[celibacy, women]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

It was, of course, natural for a young woman whose secret lover had actually impregnated her to fight with the wiliness of desperation against her dreadful fate. The most common ploy was to swear the sperm inside was holy and that one of the gods had done this thing to her. Any girl (parthenos) who managed to pull this off-and a few did-was not merely saved but was afterward treated as someone protected by divine immunity. After all, punishing a parthenos whom a god rather than a mortal man had deflowered, would inevitably provoke divine retribution.&—p. 261 [women, virgin]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

Palestinian Muslims are reminiscent of the ancient Greeks in their fanatical concern about premarital virginity. If they even suspect a girl has been unchaste, then brothers and fathers storm into action, murdering their own sisters and daughters in “honor killings.”….[Toronto Star, September 8, 1996]—&p. 261 [Islam, virgin] [honor killing is common in India too.—db]

& Celibacy as a Guarantee for Marriage: The main sources for this section are my overall research for this book and also Helene Fisher, Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy Adultery and Divorce (New York: Norton, 1992); A. D. Harvey, Sex in Geor gian England (London: Duckworth, 1994); Beverley Jackson, Splendid Slippers: A Thou- sand Years of an Erotic Tradition (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1997); Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding The History of the Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Walton Rawls, 1966); Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991); Xiao Zhou, “Virginity and Marital Sex in Contemporary China.” Feminist Studies 15 (summer 1989): 279-88; and Richard Zacks. History Laid Bare: Love, Sex and Perversity from the Etruscans to Warren G. Harding (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

Throughout the ages and the world, virginity is essential in as-yet-unmarried women. Culture, religion, and societal values demand it; the law enforces it. ages But how, precisely, does one go about proving virginity? For want of a better method, many cultures have relied on examining the hymen. This is unfortunate, because it is a little-understood membrane, and inspecting a quaking woman’s genitalia to ascertain the state of her hymen is, at best, a hit-and- miss affair.[Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991)118, quoted Robert Smith, ed., “Human Sperm Competition,” in Sperm Competition and the Evolution of Animal Mating Systems, 642]

“The Very Fine Membrane Called Honor,” a chapter in N. El Saadawi’s The Hidden Face of Eve, provides the following breakdown about various types of hymens: 11.2 percent of girls have elastic hymens; 16.16 percent delicate hymens that are easily damaged; 31.32 percent thick, elastic hymens; and 41.32 percent hymens that resemble what people suppose is normal. [The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (London: Zed Press, 1980]

… For every test there is an anti-test, and as many people specialize in concealing or repairing torn hymens as in recognizing them. In the contests between the two groups of “experts,” the great moral issue of virginity is reduced to true absurdity.—&p. 262 [virgin]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…In the past, virginity testing determined the bride price—a virgin was worth an additional cow, for example. Today, virginity has profound health implications, though some South Africans worry that instead of setting new standards of sexual morality, the certified virgins may be at risk of rape thanks to a widespread myth that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS&—p. 263 [virgin]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

On wedding nights throughout the world, proof of virginity is almost universally required. The commonest form is the bloodied sheet, proudly waved to inquisitive onlookers. Luckily, the sheet test is also the simplest to cheat on. Poor Sudanese girls, including virgins simply taking extra precautions, turn to bribable dayas, the local midwives who also perform FGM (female genital mutilation). For a fee, a daya will cook her divinations and set the marriage date to coincide with menstruation. If this is not feasible, she will, at the last moment, insert a tiny bag of chicken blood into her client to substitute for any failure of the hymen to bleed. Variations on this method, such as using congealed balls of sheep’s blood, are common everywhere.—&p. 263 [virgin]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…In Sudan, for example, wealthy nonvirgins have gynecologists surgically reconstruct the missing membrane. In ancient Greece, where the hymen was not linked with the genitals, perfumed pessaries were used to rejuvenate vaginas.

Repaired, disguised, and substituted hymens, rejuvenated vaginas, false virginity-the forces of deception are powerful. They have to be. The stakes are immense, the consequences of failure unthinkable. Preventive measures, therefore, have been correspondingly harsh: seclusion, genital mutilation, foot-binding, child marriage, terrorization.&—p. 263 [virgin]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

The virgins, alas, are often coerced rather than converted….The issue is couched in rhetoric about family honor and shame, mianzi [family honor in China] in almost every language known to man. It is seldom if ever approached from the perspective of the young woman who must bear the burden of abiding by it.&—p. 264 [China, virgin]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…Importuning, testosterone-ridden males make many promises. But if she is caught surrendering her virginity, she becomes society’s pariah, scorned, cast out, sold away, stoned by her brother’s hand, fed to hungry horses.&—p. 264 [women]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…The only attempts made to enforce male chastity–of which the Male Purity Movement was the most widespread, cohesive, and forceful-were based on moral suasion and/or fear, usually of disease, sterility, permanent damage to the tender organ, or the loss of vital powers through the lost semen.&—p. 265 [chastity, semen]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

… the ancient Nahuas or Aztecs of Mexico…society…To honor the gods, young men pierced their penises, and anyone who fainted was automatically considered wanton.&—p. 265 [tribe, ritual]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…that chastity is primarily a woman’s domain.—p. 268 [virgin, women]

…Though it condemned postures as social scum and consigned them to lives of degradation, danger and disease it sanctioned their profession. The reason was obvious: without prostitution, lascivious (p.268) men might seduce rather than marry the virgins of their own social class. It is particularly chilling that the Catholic Church, from St. Augustine on, supported the double standard and, albeit reluctantly, swallowed the equation that no prostitution equals no chastity.

This moral conflict is evident in Catholic Church or canon law, a mélange of moral theology and Roman legalistic thinking that first took coherent form in the mid-twelfth century when the monk Gratian issued his Decre–tum.  Soberly considered, the Church’s basic premises were ambiguous and morally wobbly. Its laws forced women to abide by a higher standard of sexual conduct than men. They also denounced prostitution but at the same time partially exonerated it as the safety valve that kept virgins pure.

The Church’s teachings on this issue colored and reinforced the morality centuries of Christian civilization. It is unsurprising, then, that the double standard matured as a code of sexual conduct that demanded female chastity and at the same time approved, or at least tolerated, male carnality expressed in the use of prostitutes, though this meant sacrificing certain women to sexually unrestrained men&—pp. 268-269 [chastity, moral, church, prostitution]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

This legion of prostitutes, common all over Europe but notoriously plentiful in England, played a crucial role in upholding their societies notions about chastity. Ironically, the stew was to the virgin as the savior is to the seed St. Augustine (“Remove prostitutes from human affairs, and you would pollute the world with lust” [Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard.” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (April 1959): 195-216]197]) had, centuries earlier, articulated this famously.

The classic historian of European morals, W. E. H. Lecky, elaborarted on Augustine’s premise, sensitively casting “the most mournful, and in some respects the most awful,” figure of the prostitute as a tragic actor in the human morality play.

Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted…. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted for the sins of the people. [Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (April 1959): 195-216; p. 197]

Lecky was right. Prostitutes, reviled though they were, effectively accommodated enough male lechery to ensure “good girls” remained just that. This made prostitution an essential service, without which society’s moral standards would collapse under the burden of pent-up lust.&—p. 270 [prostitute]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

….[Jane Ellice] Hopkins hated prostitution and blamed men for driving women, consumed by “disease, degradation, curses, drink, despair,” into it. “Ay, I know that it is often the woman who tempts; these poor creatures must tempt or starve. But that does not touch the broad issue, that it is men who endow the degradation of women; it is men who, making the demand, create the supply.” [Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985) 14]&—p. 275 [prostitute]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…For centuries. ever since sex-crazed women had been erased from the moral lexicon and replaced by sex-crazed men, this unstoppable male urge had justified prostitution and other sexual abuses. If it could be exposed for what it was—an unscientific fabrication-then self-control would take on new possibilities men (and women) learned to regard male sexuality as a normal physical trait akin to any other hunger. A man who overpowered a vulnerable woman by subterfuge or muscles would be judged as reprobate as one who stuffed food into his mouth before the grace or snatched cutlets from other peoples plates. As one suffragette put it, “The man or woman who is incapable of sexual self- control should be walking about on four legs, and not on two, because lack of self-control is incompatible with human nature.” [Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality, 1880-1930 (London: Pandora Press, 1985)] 50]&—p. 276 [sex]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

The other myth to be combated was that celibacy weakened the male physiology, for ironically, while millions of men worried about the loss of even one drop of semen, others anxiously observed their chaste genitalia for signs of atrophy. The medical establishment was also coming around, and some physicians admitted publicly that modern scientific thought ran counter to a persistent superstition that chastity was physically harmful to men. (Even today the old heresy limps on, as some men and some women weigh celibacy against the mantra “If you don’t use it, you lose it.”)

Over a century and a half after Mandeville’s Modest Defence of Public Stews, the moral purity movement took on the same issues but proposed diametrically different solutions. For its members, chastity in vulnerable young women was a right that self-indulgent men imperiled. Chastity in men, on (p.276) the other hand, was a proud, moral measure of self-control and constituted the best possible protection against sexual abuse of women.&—pp. 276-277 [semen, celibacy]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…the Cheyenne, for example, who bound their women into chastity belts, then remained celibate as well….—&p. 279 [celibacy]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…Abolition of slavery would hasten the end of this intolerable situation and liberate vulnerable white women as well as slaves.  In fact, this was one of the abolitionists’ stronger counterarguments to slavery defender’s fear about rampaging black male sexuality.—&p. 281 [slavery]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

In fact, chastity belts were exceedingly rare. They were not unicorns-they did really exist—but they are far more common in literature and in the popular imagination than as actual hardware, and in Europe, only the cruelest, most obsessive men forced their women into one. Those unlucky women, however, numbered at least in the hundreds….&—p. 282 [chastitiy]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…The British Museum, for instance, has a copy of a Heinrich Aldegreyer engraving portraying a love-struck young couple, naked except for her chastity belt. In one hand she grips a key, evidently to the one garment she wears, and stares uncertainly into his pleading eyes. Dare she or daren’t she? That is the unanswered question.&—p. 283 [sex, chastity]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

First of all, surviving belts are all slightly different, but their essential design is the same. They have hip bands formed of anywhere from four to ten iron-jointed strips. The portion that passes between the legs is also jointed so it bends back up again, behind the woman’s posterior. Some attention was given to decoration and the wearer’s comfort. Designs are etched into the surface, and the insides are padded with velvet or silk. There is a slit in the front for urine and blood, and a hole, often heart-shaped, in the rear for feces. These openings are surrounded by saw-edged teeth that would quickly lacerate or mince any penis inserted into them.&—p. 283 [chastity]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…In North America, the Cheyenne people also invented the chastity belt.  The Cheyenne view of premarital chastity was so grim that a young woman hope of a respectable marriage if a boy had so much as touched her genitals or  breasts-Cheyenne virginity was a deadly serious business. As soon as a girl first menstruated, she had to wear a rope-and-rawhide chastity belt that circled her waist, was knotted in front, then drawn down and backward between thighs in two pieces. Each piece was curled around and thigh to just above the knee. This contraption guarded the genitals but did not interfere with the woman’s gait, so she could walk normally even when it was on.  She always attached it at night and, when she was away from home, during the day as well. Even after marriage, her husband might oblige her to resume wearing it during his long absences during hunting season or war parties&—p. 284 [chastity]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

 [Even after marriage: Cheyenne males also practiced rigorous sexual control. They could not court or marry until they had been in a war party and they spaced their children ten to twelve years apart, with celibacy as birth control. Some even swore an oath that they would abide by this practice, which won them great respect in their camp.& Notes, p. 460.— [celibacy]

& TESTING FOR MAIDENHEADS [The main sources for this section are Jan Bremmer, ed., From Sappho to De Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality (London, New York: Routledge, 1989)]

…Cheyenne husbands pun-(p.284)ished unfaithful wives by “putting them on the prairie,” a form of institutionalized gang rape, sometimes followed by cutting off their noses. In one tribal version, “they post some thirty young men on the road by which they know their wives must pass… the husband issues from the ambuscade and says to his wife: As I know that you are fond of men, I offer you a feast of them- take your fill.’ Her cries are futile; several of them hold her, and they enjoy her one after the other.” (Virgins unwilling to marry were subjected to the same sexual violence in an attempt to force marriage on them.)—pp. 284-285 [Lawrence A. Conrad, “An Early Eighteenth Century Reference to ‘Putting a Woman on the Prairies among the Central Algonquians and Its Implications for Moore’s Explanation of the Practice among the Cheyenne,” Plains Anthropologist 28, no. 100 (1983): 141-42; 142] [women, chastity]

Ahmed, a young veterinarian, describes a typical wedding night with a wife like Fahtma. First, penetration on the first night “is virtually impossible. You are dealing with heavy scar tissue that is overgrown, and you are using flesh to generate it, and not iron.” Traditionally, men open up their terrified wives with knives or swords. Otherwise, they will emerge from the bridal chamber with penis throbbing and abraded, as if they had violated a saw-toothed chastity belt instead of their wife’s mutilated vagina. These honeymoon ventrures often land both husband and wife in the hospital. In Ahmed’s Sudanese culture, nuptial sex is so perilous it frequently requires medical intervention.—p. 287 [Hanny Lightfoot- Klein, Prisoners of Ritual An Odyssey into Female Genital Circumcision in Africa (Binghampton: Harrington Park Press, 1989), 125] [circumcision]

FGM [Female Genital Mutilation] like chastity belts purdah, veiling, and crippled little “golden lotus” feet, is man’s response to the exigencies of Virginity Chastity, Celibacy—the nonsexual trinity at the core of many cultures….—p. 288 [celibacy, virgin]

Foot-binding probably began at the end of the T’ang dynasty (618-907) when palace dancers’ feet were compressed rather than bound….—p. 288 [China, woman]

Of course, it is not the actual milk that works this magic, but rather in large part lactation, which extends postpartum amenorrhea. When mothers suckle every few hours, ovulation is depressed, so even if sexual relations occur, the chances of conceiving are much lower.—p. 295 [sex]

…Once a woman had been married, society recognized her husband’s right to exclusive sexual ownership, which continued in force even after his death. The general view was that a widow’s remarriage violated that ownership by transferring it to a new man, which was widely regarded as a betrayal of her first husband.—p. 313 [marriage, women, widow]

…”A man with a hundred tongues would die before finishing the task of lecturing upon the vices and defects of women, even if he were to do nothing else throughout a long life of a hundred years.” [Shakuntala Narasimahan, Sati: A Story of Widow Burning in India (New Delhi, New York: Viking, 1990) 28]—p. 315 [man, woman]

          The cult of Cybele was introduced into Rome in 204 B.C. The priests, or galli, castrated themselves…. Romans, forbidden by law to join the priesthood or to castrate themselves, mocked the galli as half-men.  The Roman poet Martial penned the following scornful lines, falsely accusing the galli of the sexual impropriety of cunnilingus.

          They cut your cock off, but not so to bed,

          Cunt-lover: what neds doctoring now’s your head.

          For while your missing member can’t but fail,

          Your tongue still breaks Cybele’s rule: its’ male. [Deborah Sawyer, Women and Religion in the First Christian Centuries (New York: Routledge, 1996) 122]—p. 320 [sex, celibacy]

…By the tenth century, a special form of castration was officially recognized. Approved applicants went to a ch’ang tzu-a little hut-outside the palace where a freelance, government-certified castrator and his apprentices operated.

The patient’s abdomen and upper thighs were tightly bound and his genitalia bathed three times in hot pepper-water, an unfortunately mild anesthetic. The future eunuch was placed in a semirecline on a heated couch, and assistants gripped his waist and legs. The castrator stood before his client, clenching a small, curved blade. “Will you regret it or not?” he intoned. At the least sign of hesitation, the operation was off. Otherwise, he leaned over, made an expert excision, and voilà! A new eunuch.

With scrotum and penis gone, the castrator plugged up the urethra. Then his helpers covered the wound with soaking paper and bandaged it. Now the eunuch had to stand and, clutching the assistants, walk around and around the hut for two or three hours before he was permitted to lie down and rest. For three days he drank no liquid, so terrible thirst compounded his suffering. After three days, the castrator unplugged him. If urine poured out, the operation had been successful. If not, he was doomed to agonizing death. (p. 321)

Now came the crucial disposal of the pao, or treasure, as the butchered genitalia ere referred to.  Only the most careless castrator forgot to preserve the genitalia, for without this powerful item, a eunuch could expect no professional promotions.  He also needed them when he died, so the next stage of life complete if not intact.

Often, the trauma and torment of his castration drove the thought of his pao out of the new eunuch’s mind and he forgot to ask for it. Technically, it then reverted to the castrator, who routinely sold it to its original owner for a sum of up to eight times the cost of the actual procedure. In later years, if the owner for a pao was lost or stolen, the eunuch would purchase or rent someone else’s to continue in his job. […]

…They were said to be so sensitive about their missing genitalia that acquaintances dared not even mention a broken teapot or a tailless dog in their presence.—pp. 321-322 [Chinese Eunuchism as a Career Opportunity: The main source for this section is Taisuke Mitamura (trans. Charles A. Pomeroy), Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1970). All quotations are from Mitamura.] [eunuch, castration]

One such powerful eunuch, the Ching Shih Fang, monitored the emperor’s sexual relations with his empress and also his concubines and recorded the date of intercourse so that if conception took place, the emperor’s paternity would be assured. At dinnertime, the Ching Shih Fang would select about twenty concubines’ nameplates and offer them to the emperor like an after-dinner delicacy. After the emperor had made his selection, the chosen woman was stripped and carried to the imperial bedchamber on another eunuch’s back. Later, the Ching Shih Fang would call out, “Time is up!” and unless the emperor wished that night’s favorite to bear his child, she was dismissed.

Curiously, eunuchs also supervised the emperor’s sexual education, using erotic images as teaching aids….Emperor Ling of the later Han dynasty liked to lie with his head in a eunuch’s lap and called his two special eunuchs “my mother” and “my father.” This relaxed intimacy is not surprising, given the emperor’s alienation from real life and the constant care, instruction, and solace his favorite eunuchs would have provided him since his confined and lonely childhood.—p. 323, [Chinese Eunuchism as a Career Opportunity: The main source for this section is Taisuke Mitamura (trans. Charles A. Pomeroy), Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1970). All quotations are from Mitamura.] [enuch]

…Lao Ts’ai, a hated tax-collector, allegedly murdered virgin boys then devoured their brains, hoping (p.323) to regrow his genitals. Another eunuch did the same with the brains of seven executed criminals. Others married and attempted sexual relations, sometimes with artificial devices. Some kept concubines. The vast majority, however, were celibates who never lost their sexual desire, merely the means of expressing it.—pp. 323-324. [Chinese Eunuchism as a Career Opportunity: The main source for this section is Taisuke Mitamura (trans. Charles A. Pomeroy), Chinese Eunuchs: The Structure of Intimate Politics (Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1970). All quotations are from Mitamura.] [eunuch]

At first, only foreigners or slaves were castrated, but as the institution of eunuchism developed, even emperors castrated their sons to eliminate rivals or to place them in such high positions as the Orthodox Church’s bishop, patriarchy of Constantinople, which required celibacy, preferably of the eunuch variety….—p. 325 [eunuch]

A doctor sometimes forced to perform these mutilations described the two procedures. The compression method consisted of soaking young boys in hot water and then squeezing their testicles until they were crushed into nothingness. In the more drastic excision method, both testicles were surgically removed, which produced eunuchs who, unlike their testicularly compressed brothers, allegedly experienced no erotic sensations at all.

Excision was preferable to compression because it eliminated even more sexual desire. However, when the operation was performed on a postadolescent youth, there was no guarantee it would remove his ability to achieve erection. It happened, therefore, that on rare occasions, a eunuch had sexual relations with a palace woman. Whenever such a liaison was discovered, the eunuch offender was executed. The mere possibility of such a scandal was so great that eunuchs who displayed homosexual tendencies were tolerated and sometimes even welcomed. Ironically, homosexuality was punished by castration, leading the public to equate eunuchs with homosexuals. Homosexuality was also the preferred charge against those suspected of plotting against the emperor.—p. 325 [[eunuch]

Black African Eunuchs of the Ottoman Empire: The main sources for this section are Shaun Marmon, Eunuchs and Sacred Boundaries in Islamic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Justin McCarthy, The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923 (New York: Longman, 1997); V. J. Parry et al., A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730: Chapters from the Cambridge History of Islam and the New Cambridge Modern History (Cam- bridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Ehud R. Toledano, “The Imperial Eunuchs of Istanbul: From Africa to the Heart of Islam.” Middle Eastern Studies 20 (July 1984): 379-89; and Andrew Wheatcroft. The Ottomans (London: Viking, 1993). 326 “neutral emissaries in”: Marmon, 5.

… Each eunuch’s castration personified his office and was one of three modes: the radical mumsuh, excision of both penis and testicles; khasi, only testicles removed; and majbub, penis severed but testicles intact. Virtually all Ottoman court eunuchs were mamus.—p. 326 [eunuch]

Eunuchs first surfaced in the Muslim world in the twelfth century as priests in a cult known as Eunuchs of the Prophet. Forty eunuchs with life- time appointments kept perpetual vigil at the Prophet’s tomb in Medina. The tombs of Shiite imam Ali at Najaf, Sultan Hasan at Dome of the Rock Jerusalem, and of Saladin also had eunuch guards.—p. 326 [eunuch]

The eunuchs who emerged alive from the ordeal, however, were precious commodities, expensive, rare, and difficult to obtain. What better gift to impress and ingratiate oneself with the sultan, the man with everything else? So the palace seldom needed to purchase eunuchs as the vast majority were given as gifts.—p. 327 [eunuch]

Once “manufactured,” the young eunuchs were sent to a highly regimented school where strict, elderly, castrated instructors taught them Turkish high-court culture, the etiquette of the palace, and how to perform their duties there. Playtime was allowed, and the youngest eunuchs mingled with harem slave girls, who were also learning their future trade. When the eunuchs graduated, they entered into service with the rank of en asagi-the lowest. Older eunuchs were sometimes brought to the palace after long service in high-ranking private households in Istanbul or the provinces.—p. 327 [eunuch]

…In the USA, castration for eugenic reasons continued from 1899 until 1930s, and in several Southern states was the punishment of choice for males convicted or even suspected of raping white females.

In Europe, Germany enthusiastically embraced eugenics, and in 1933 Eugenic Sterilization Act made sterilization obligatory for everyone suffering from hereditary disabilities. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute assisted, by instructing physicians in the niceties of “race science” and training them to carry out their related duties. Nazi “justice,” too, often involved genital mutilation. During the Third Reich, four hundred thousand people judged unfit to reproduce were sterilized, many by castration. One of the first groups earmarked were the “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed-race children of German mothers and African American post-World War I occupation troops. Others were those afflicted with blindness, deafness, physical disabilities, feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, and manic-depression. With suitable semantics, vagrants and alcoholics too, could be classified as feebleminded and thus desexed.—p. 336 [eunuch, castration]

By 1929, twenty-four American states, notably California and Virginia. had enacted sterilization laws to prevent future genetic defects. By 1958, 60,926 people had been neutered, with police hunting down escapees and forcing them back to undergo the procedure.—p. 336 [America, sterilization]

In Canada, only the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta passed eugenics laws. British Columbia sterilized at most a few hundred. Between 1928 and 1971, Alberta’s Board of Eugenics ordered 2,822 citizens neutered About 700 survivors are currently suing for compensation.—p. 336 [[eunuch, sterilization]

Today, a sexualization of sexual offenders is now achieved through chemical rather than physical castration. The former is seen as less drastic and is al reversible….—p. 336 [castration]

…Chemical castration is used in the USA, Canada, and Europe, though it produces more recidivists—about 6 percent is only study—than surgical castration.—p. 337 [castration]

Currently, overpopulated China’s new Eugenics and Health Protection Law attempts to prevent “inferior births” through a mixture of mandatory castration, sterilization, abortion, and celibacy. It is aimed at people with hereditary, venereal, or contagious diseases-for instance, hepatitis B—or severe psychoses.—p. 337 [China]

In Thailand, an amateur form of unofficial but radical castration is on the rise. Over one hundred vengeful women have drugged unfaithful husbands, then hacked off their penises. Authorities consider the problem so serious they have formed a Penis Patrol. This patrol is summoned whenever another victim awakes to discover his genital region bloody and minus its most crucial member. Like a search party, they look in nearby fields for the butchered penis, racing against time to rush it to the hospital for reattachment. Often they locate it, but one enraged wife fooled them by attaching her husband’s penis to a helium balloon to ensure he’d never get it back. [The source for this section is Penis Amputation in Thailand, a documentary by Matt Fry shown on CBC television, August 2, 1998, on the Sunday Morning Live program.]—p. 337 [castration]

One consequence of this wave of penis amputations is that Thai surgeons are now world authorities on penis reattachment. One surgeon alone has reconnected thirty-one penises to their original owners….—p. 337 [castration]

The amputators, women unwilling to tolerate their spouses’ philandering and mistresses, are escalating their illicit but effective campaign. They face ten years’ imprisonment if found guilty of the crime, but the cutting edge of this story is that they are prepared to serve their time as long as they make their point by nipping their husbands’ infidelities in the bud.—p. 337 [castration]

Celibacy to Repress Unconventional or Sorrowful Sexuality

…Freud’s conclusion was that da Vinci “appears to us as a man whose sexual drives and activity were extraordinarily low, as I some higher aspiration lifted him above ordinary animal necessity.”[ Sigmund Freud (trans. A. A. Brill), Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence (London: Kegan Paul, French, Trubner & Co., 1932) 67-68]—p. 340 [sex]

John (Ruskin) was revolted. He had never before seen a naked woman and had supposed they were somehow more different from men than Effie (Euphemia Gray) proved to be. He actually concluded she had a deformity because she was “not formed to excite passion.” (An alternate theory is that her womanly breasts were the problem because he had expected a smooth, hairless, and tiny-breasted figure much like the ten-year-old child he fell in love with a decade later.) Given John’s tempestuous state of mind, he was remarkably calm. He merely embraced his wife, turned over, and slept. Effie, who had been prepared to follow her older husband’s more knowledgeable, perhaps experienced lead, was dumbfounded.—p. 343 [sex]

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, 1740

          The Kreutzer Sonata maintains its enraged tone until the end, a diatribe against sexuality and carnality, against marriage and the hatred that too often develops between husband and wife, and against the theories and arguments that encourage procreation…..Ironically, soon after The Kreutzer Sonata was published, Tolstoy was unable to abide by his own impassioned pleas.  He violated his vow of chastity by forcing himself on his wife, simultaneously impregnating and embittering her.[The Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness (London: Walter Scott, 1888)—p. 371 [Tolstoy, sex]

In Africa, too, in countries where polygamy is common, clerical celibacy is an enormous obstacle to the recruitment of indigenous priests. It directly contradicts the traditional view that “marriage is the focus of existence… a duty, a requirement from the corporate society, and a rhythm of life in which everyone must participate…. He who does not… is a curse to the community, he is a rebel and a law-breaker, he is not only abnormal, but ‘underhuman.’” [Anglican clergyman John Mbiti in Raymond Hickey, Africa: The Case for an Auxiliary Priesthood, London: Geother Chapman, 1980) 133]

In Africa, clerical celibacy is practiced mainly in the breach, so the issue becomes not celibacy but limiting priests to merely one wife. “In African culture,” a missionary says, “if you are somebody, you have two wives. Some- times four or five. Now a priest is a man of honor: if he has two or more wives, no problem whatsoever.” Except that he cannot marry legally, and so his common-law wives cluster nearby him in separate huts. No wonder African bishops demand the right to ordain married priests. [David Rice, Shattered Vows: Exodus from the Priesthood (London: Michael Joseph, 1990) 164]—p. 379 [celibacy, priest, monk]

…Life in the Andes centers around the notion of the pareja, the couple, and a man’s authority is based on his having a family. Celibacy is neither understood nor respected. Responsible men are supposed to have families and support them. The idea of a celibate Peruvian leader is an oxymoron. Is it any wonder that an estimated 80 percent of Peruvian priests cohabit with women?—p. 379 [celibacy]

In the Philippines, a small majority of priests live with women. Rural manses are always peopled by the priest’s extended family, and a priest’s wife is introduced as an aunt or sister, his children as his nieces and nephews. So widespread is this practice that most parishioners are reluctant to donate to Sunday’s collection plate, knowing it is destined for the support of the priest’s family.—p. 380 [celibacy, priest]

Continue from here %%%$$$

…A young Polish priest places this attitude in context: “Compulsory celibacy is just a human law. Everyone knows it’s going to change eventually. So why should our lives be spoiled by something that’s going to change in twenty years’ time?” David Rice, Shattered Vows: Exodus from the Priesthood (London: Michael Joseph, 1990) 166]—p. 380

…And, says married ex-priest David Rice in Shattered Vows, “there is the priest who uses his Roman collar as a tomcat uses his miaow, to charm all the women he and to lure them to bed-and then uses his collar a second time round, to break the relationship or evade his responsibilities.”[ David Rice, Shattered Vows: Exodus from the Priesthood (London: Michael Joseph, 1990) 164]—p. 380

…Some priests simply endure, with loneliness their overriding companion. Many cheat and take lovers they either disguise as housekeepers or friends or flaunt as mistresses. Others find the struggle intolerable and finally leave; of those who do so, 94 percent identify their discomfort with celibacy as their prime motive. Since Vatican II, over one hundred thousand have joined the exodus, more than one every two hours, nearly one-quarter of the world’s working priests….—p. 384

…Sipe’s study estimated that nearly 40 percent of American priests are chronically uncelibate, 20 percent in stable relationships with one women, nearly as many with adult men. A minority, the pedophiles, foist themselves on minors both male and female.—p. 386 [Sipe’s study estimated: McKenty, for example, had an on-again, off-again, decade-long sexual liaison with Denise, a divorced Catholic woman (McKenty, 86-87). Overwhelming anecdotal evidence also supports Sipe’s view, indeed suggests that it is conservative.]—notes, 469 [A. W. Richard Sipe, A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990)]

A number of religious abide by The Third Way, a clerical lifestyle that sprang up after the 1960s sexual revolution, during which priests would frequently bars where they picked up women for necking and getting sessions but steered clear of sexual intercourse. In the 1970s, this behavior matured into The Third Way, a more thoughtful venture shared by nuns and priests as partners who shared affection and personal confidences in dating/necking/petting relationships that seldom led to overt sex. Decades later, nuns and priests continue to practice The Third Way, though less publicly.—p. 386 [Mary Griffin, The Courage to Choose: An American Nun’s Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975)167]

Others, dissatisfied with these attempts to indulge sensuality and deepen personal development without actually having sex, maintain that, after all, celibacy prohibits marriage, not sex, an argument that permits them guilt-free sexual expression. These priests, and the nuns who often share their beds, claim to believe that by not creating families, with all the concomitant (p.386) responsibilities and duties, they retain at least a technical celibacy that permits them to “devote themselves full-time to the service of the larger human family after the pattern of Christ.”—pp. 386-387 [Mary Griffin, The Courage to Choose: An American Nun’s Story (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975)167]

Claire-Voie (Open Road) provides ample evidence of this unfortunate tendency. Claire-Voie is a France-based support group for priests’ lovers, the mistresses hidden in the shadows, the mothers who cannot name the man who fathered, and also bastardized, their children. The stories are legion. When Father Ghislain’s superiors discovered his intimate relationship with Monique, a parishioner, they relocated him and ordered him to keep Monique a secret. Pregnant Maya Lahoud’s lover was transferred across the ocean to Quebec. Before he left, he asked her to sign a legal document in which he acknowledged paternity of her child whom he pledged to support, but only if Maya agreed never to reveal his identity. Other priests with mistresses report their superiors maintain discreet silences about their affairs, tacitly sanctioning profound hypocrisy and, from their own professional perspective, sin.—p. 387 [Other priests with mistresses: “Clerical Liaisons: The Sins of the Fathers,” Globe and Mail. June 24, 1995.]

… How, given the cross fire of pronouncements supporting and denouncing clerical celibacy, and Pope John Paul II’s declaration that priests who desecrate their vows of celibacy bring tragedy upon themselves, can any religious genuinely suppose they can hide behind a shallow definition? How, drenched in the tears of hundreds of thousands of defecting priests, can they dismiss the anguish of these men who understand celibacy as a much greater commitment than merely retaining legal bachelorhood? How, deafened by the cries of women abandoned or ignored by the priests who impregnated them, can other priests pretend that celibacy only means being unmarried? How, in the shadow of groups like Corpus (Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service), can they persist in denying that priestly celibacy is a complex and profound condition not susceptible to alteration by blithe redefinition? Surely it would be far more fruitful for them to harken to the men of Corpus and like-minded organizations, whose painful decisions to leave the priesthood expose the real issues involved and whose lobbying seeks to clarify and, of course, to change the canon law that even the pope has admitted is not Church doctrine but discipline.—p. 388 [Globe and Mail, October 22, 1993, reporting a June 1993 declaration by Pope John Paul II]

DIVORCE À LA CATHOLIC CHURCH

Corpus [(Corps of Reserve Priests United for Service)] began in 1974 in response to an American bishop’s dismissal of married ex-priests as of no further use to the Catholic Church. This, at a time when ten thousand ex-priests had married and polls showed that 79 percent of Catholics would welcome married priests, galvanized Corpus’s founders to create an advocacy group that is now greatly expanded and highly professional

Corpus’s original cause was simply to work toward an acceptance of a married priesthood-in other words, to end compulsory clerical celibacy. Today, its mission has expanded to locating and communicating with ex-priests, providing media information about related data such as the number of priests who continue to leave, and endorsing other concerned Catholic groups that aim to smash the rule of mandatory celibacy.—p. 388 [Corpus began in 1974: Worldwide, there are many such groups the UK’s MOMM the Movement for the Ordination of Married Men and Advent Chile’s Siete Sacramentos; and groups in dozens of other countries].—Notes. p. 470

…the percentage of clergy who commit criminal acts is tiny compared to those who violate their vows of celibacy with consenting adults, whether other religious or laypeople.  And not all priests who marry were uncelibate when they resigned from holy orders. Ultimately, though, compulsory celibacy is the common denominator of their fight against Church discipline. Sexually active married priests can be just as effective as the voluntarily celibate, they argue. Both can function in states of grace, and God alone grants each soul his special gift.—p. 389

“Celibacy was an issue for me,” [Eaugh, 40] reported an apostate nun explaining her decision to leave. “I missed male companionship.” A second fell in love with a Jesuit for whom she conceived “an intellectual attraction, an emotional attraction, a comradeship of souls and physical attraction.” [Ibid., 41] When a teaching nun “started to have dreams and fantasies about my eighth-grade boys… I knew it was time to go.” [Ibid., 42]”I began to want children of my own,” [Ibid. 46]recalled another. Typical reasons that, after the 1960s, outweighed celibacy’s payoffs for the devout nun and contributed more than a few drops to the bleeding.

Since Vatican II and the sexual revolution, over three hundred thousand (p.391) nuns and two hundred thousand priests worldwide have formally renounced their sacred vows, including celibacy, and defected.  Half a million men and women, former religious, are now integrated, with varying degrees of success, into the world.  For a great many, celibacy had become the great stumbling block to their personal and spiritual missions.—pp. 391-392 [Fuchs Ebaugh, Women in the Vanishing Cloister: Organizational Decline in Catholic Religious Orders in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993)]

Benedictine monastics in the charismatic Our Lady of Guadalupe in Pecos, New Mexico, for example, pair up for prayer, and most pairs consist of a man and a woman. “We are celibate, but we love one another,” one member explains. In contrast to monks throughout history, whose primary relationship was with God and God alone, these Benedictines foster their human connections, which they prize as an essential element of spirituality.—p. 392 [Charles A. Fracchia, Living Together Alone: The New American Monasticism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979, 20]

….Like Benedictine celibacy, marriage begins as a sacred lifetime commitment that requires self-transcendence.  Both celibacy and matrimony “are a discipline.  Both can be a form of asceticism,” Norris quotes one nun approvingly….—p. 393 [Kathleen Norris, the Protestant author of The Cloister Walk (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996]

…North America’s sexual revolution is now mainstream way of life, By now, its effects are showing-for one thing, it has probably cropped years off the age of the average virgin. Today age of losing virginity is 17.4 for girls, 16.6 for boys, about three years earlier than in the late, staid 1950s. Broken down, these figures are actually startling: 19 percent of adolescents between the ages of thirteen and fifteen  are nonvirgins. By age sixteen and seventeen, this rises to 55 percent and fully 72 percent of all high-school seniors have had intercourse, at least half with more than one partner. [Michele Ingrassia, “Virgin Cool,” Newsweek, October 17, 1994, 61; Nancy Gibbs, “How Should We Teach Our Children About Sex?” Time, May 24, 1993, 53. 394 fully 72 percent: Gibbs, 53.]

These figures do not paint a picture of uninhibited, liberating and rewarding sexuality. To the contrary, they are adrip with poisonous consequences: a rash of pregnancies— by the time American women reach twenty, 43 percent will have become pregnant once (one every twenty-six seconds)–among mainly unmarried, ill-prepared mothers….—p. 394 [Nancy Gibbs, “How Should We Teach Our Children About Sex?” Time, May 24, 1993, 56]

Rates of sexually transmitted disease (STD) have also skyrocketed, so the today, by the age of twenty-one years, about one in four is infected with such STDs as chlamydia, syphilis, or gonorrhea. More frightening AIDS is making new inroads among young people….—p. 394 [“Teenage sex: just say ‘Wait,” U.S. News & World Report, July 26, 1993, 61. The source is the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control.]

…Alarmingly, even more girls (but only 35 percent of boys) succumbed to pressure from their sweethearts, while 58 percent of both were driven by the desire to impress their friends and (p.394) become more popular. This, despite the ever-hardy double standard by which they judge themselves: two-thirds agree that sexual experience enhances a boy’s reputation while it damages a girl’s. –pp. 394-395. [Nancy Gibbs, “How Should We Teach Our Children About Sex?” Time, May 24, 1993, 53]

…Then, a young woman could reasonably calculate that she had only seven years of chastity to conquer before she married, at which point she could surrender her virginity with the full approval of parents, religious authorities, and mainstream society. Today, both she and her brother are under severe pressure from hormones, a sex-driven society that scorns virgins as geeks, friends and classmates who taunt virgins and boast of their own sexual prowess, and the personal pain of dealing with boyfriends who coax or coerce them to have sex when they would prefer not to.—p. 395

In this sex-sated world, feminists interpret the sexual act from the perspective of power politics, revealing how it, too, is integrally linked to the inequities between men and women. Unfortunately, their analyses have inspired some other women to conclude that righting the wrongs of the damnable double standard means adopting male sexual standards. Translated into action, this has led to belt-notching, score-keeping, power-play sex, initiated and controlled by women. They see nothing ironic about defining independence and equality as gaining mastery of infinite varieties of what Erica Jong famously dubbed “the zipless fuck.”@ In their combative version of the sexual revolution, real women carry condoms in their jeans, grade (out of ten, for instance) the hard curves of men’s buttocks, and initiate sex with partners who arouse their transient lust.—p. 395

@ t is decades since I read Fear of Flying, but Jong’s single-minded quest for said “zipless fuck” still resonates in my memory.—notes, p. 471

TRUE LOVE WAITS [The main source for this section is True Love Waits literature. Wendy Kaminer, True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1996), and newspaper and magazine articles were also used, especially Nancy Gibbs, “How Should We Teach Our Children About Sex?” Time, May 24, 1993, 56; and Michele Ingrassia, “Virgin Cool,” Newsweek, October 17, 1994.]

The crucial core of the True Love Waits philosophy is contained in this pledge that hundreds of thousands of young women and men have signed:

Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate and my future children to be sexually abstinent from this day, until the day I enter a Biblical marriage relationship

…. When true loves strikes, the man and woman so blessed should respond by making their union permanent, legal, and honorable in a ceremony that is biblically inspired. Afterward, in the final sublime sequence, comes sexual consummation.—p. 396. Wendy Kaminer, True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1996)]

True Love Waits (to be wed in holy matrimony before going the way) was founded in April 1993 in the U.S. Bible Belt city of Nashville, Tennessee after youth minister Richard Ross was galvanized by two fourteen-year-olds who confided to him, “We’re the only virgins left in our school.” [Michele Ingrassia, “Virgin Cool,” Newsweek, October 17, 199462]Ther have been, and their plight was replicated in promiscuous educational institutions all over the Western world….—p. 396

…”Students who have failed sexually can be invited to seek God’s forgiveness and make a True Love Waits pledge ‘from this day forward.’” [From True Love Waits literature, Wendy Kaminer, True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1996),] Ergo, instant redemption, and though even True Love Waits cannot repair broker hymens, it does comfort the contrite and pardon the penitent.—p. 396

…Homosexual attractions are not immoral, but sexualizing them crosses the biblical barrier and is sinful. Walk closer to God. [True Love Waits]—p. 397

…However, because of the movement’s focus on sexual abstinence and the moral courage it inspires in believers, they have little difficulty in abiding by their vows [of True Love Waits].—p. 397

Should recalcitrant educational officials stymie the students’ efforts during the long, complicated process preceding the Valentine’s Day Vision, “the students should graciously say they will need to discuss the issue further and will return at a later time.” [From True Love Waits literature, Wendy Kaminer, True Love Waits: Essays and Criticism (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1996),]. Avoid emotionalism….—p. 397

…Power Virginity has proven itself both powerful and empowering. It is assertive rather than defensive. Its assumption that virginity is noble and not embarrassingly old-fashioned or cumbersome, something to hide until one can get rid of it, gives its virgins a welcome sense of self-control and self-definition. Until True Love Waits appeared on the scene, virginity was too often a burden. Now virgins can say, “It is my life and it shouldn’t matter to anyone if I have sex or not. Furthermore, “If you’re secure in your decision, what other people say is not going to affect you.” [Two teenage True Love Waits Canadian converts quoted buy Scott Steele, “Lide a Virgin,” Maclean’s March 14, 1994, 59] Power Virginity has become acceptably cool.—p. 399

…Significantly, a barrage of publicity surrounding True may Love Waits petered out after 1994 and now surfaces only sporadically. At the me time, teenage pregnancies are again rising, most to unmarried mothers. No doubt thousands of young people still wait virginally for true love, but it is far from apparent that the True Love Waits movement has redefined the morality of the current generation.—p. 399

                              Epilogue

…other convinces celibates, most people view celibacy as sad and lonely at best, unnatural at worst, the preserve of priests and nuns, spinsters and prisoners, and other pitiable victims.—p. 426

But throughout the ages, celibacy has been a double-edged sword. As a chosen lifestyle, it may empower and liberate, but when coerced it can repress and crush. Depending upon the nature of the experiment, celibacy sustains or torments, emboldens or embitters, protects or humiliates, comforts or punishes.

Usually, celibacy combines elements of each of these polarities with one outbalancing the other. This is notably true in the case of voluntary celibates….—p. 426

…I happened to be celibate because I was not in a relationship. From the outside, my decision changed precisely nothing. Yet to me, the transition from circumstantial to convinced celibacy felt transformative. As for so many others, in history and in the present, the element of choice made all the difference in how I experienced celibacy. Instead of burdensome and frustrating, it now felt joyous and liberating.

This because for me, as for most women, celibacy has major tangible benefits, namely respite from the time-consuming burdens of housewifery, to which even liberated professionals succumb. I am particularly grateful to be relieved of that aspect of previous relationships. No longer do I need to plan, shop for, cook, serve, and clean up after a week’s meals, or iron the shirts I once foolishly boasted I could do better than the dry cleaner, or answer that infernal question “Honey, where are my socks?”

For this privilege of living according to my own rhythms and rationing my days to suit my own needs, I pay the price of sex. I could, of course, indulge in fly-by-night affairs, without having to iron a single shirt or locate even one elusive sock, but that solution is unappealing. I prefer the simpler path of renouncing sexual relations altogether. At the same time, I have several close male friends and feel even safer in our emotional intimacy now that I know nothing more complicated will ever evolve.(p. 429)

…Without marriage and childbearing behind me, I know that I would not find celibacy so rewarding. For me, celibacy has not meant sacrificing the incomparable joys of rocking a tiny baby, and shaping and sharing the life of this beloved flesh of my flesh. There is no question in my mind that as a younger woman, I could never have chosen celibacy.—pp. 429-

I differ from many other celibates in another way-I have not found celibacy spiritually enlightening. I seek spirituality in my religion, Christianity, but exploring its roots as I researched this book left me instead struggling to retain my religious faith. Celibacy’s long history cuts to the core of Christian doctrine, and its pernicious portrayal of women and its fundamental misogyny caused me great personal pain. Ultimately, the examples of so many of the courageous and energetic women I wrote about, and the recent appointments of my Anglican Church’s Bishops Victoria Matthews and Ann Tottenham, whom I know and admire, prevailed over my resentment and doubt, and I reclaimed Christianity, albeit my own unorthodox version. I now recite my Church’s creeds with mental reservations, interpret the Scriptures my own way, and disdain my religion’s teachings about the role of women. In my case, the history (as opposed to the practice) of celibacy shook and transformed but failed to destroy my faith.—p. 430 [Wonderful conclusion based on personal experience assisted by scholarly research supported by intellectual rational analysis still returning back to the bhakti/faith on her own terms.  Bart D. Eherman should read this.db]