from Karen Armstrong “The Gospel According To Woman” – Chapter 1 -The Problem: Sex ( Pan; London:1986)

p. 1

Christianity has formed Western society and Christianity has been the only major religion to hate and fear sex. Consequently it is in the west alone that women have been hated because they are sexual beings instead of merely being dominated because they are inferior chattels.

p. 3

Judaism has never hated sexuality in the way Christianity has done, because it is a racial religion. The Chosen People have to propagate themselves and so women, as mothers, have a particularly importantly, even crucial religious role. …Celibacy has never been considered valuable by the majority of Jews, because continuing the Jewish race has been too important.

p. 7-8

The ideal of ‘Holy Matrimony’ which most Christians now take for granted as essential teaching came into Christianity late in its history. It was not until the Anglican and Puritan theologians of the

17th centuries began to p[ush the ideal with such extreme efficiency, that marriage got a new profile.

p. 11

In fact in the Gospels as a whole women have rather a good press. They are not seen as irrelevant impediments. Some of Jesus’ best friends were women. The women don’t run away at the crucifixion, for instance, as do most of the male disciples. Often Jesus gives some of

his most important teachings to women like the outcast woman at the well in Samaria. He had a band of women followers in the tradition of

the holy men of Galilee who had usually worked alongside of women.

p. 16

1 Corinthians 11;3-12 …14:34-35 … These rather bad tempered remarks constitute the whole of Paul’s misogyny and are not characteristic of his usual egalitarianism.

p. 20

Nobody would say that Christianity has taught us to love, cherish and value our bodies. In fact most Christians have seen the Christian life in terms of a war against the body and the physical. …Whether or not we accept the Christian message, we have been affected by Christianity’s dislike of the body. We still tend to divide ourselves

into body and soul; our spirits are the valuable and important parts of ourselves and our bodies are rather gross and shameful things which

must not be pandered to. Neither Jesus nor St Paul would have understood this separation between body and soul because Judaism at that time did not divide people up in this way. When Paul decries ‘flesh’, as he so often does, he doesn’t mean the body as opposed to the soul. in Jewish thought ‘flesh’ meant man (soul and body together) in all his physical and moral frailty….. For Paul ‘flesh’ is not the body but man as he exists (body / soul together) unredeemed

by Christ. The separation of man into body and soul came from the Greeks, but we also know that the Greeks thought of the body as something divine if it was beautiful. When later Greek-trained theologians read Paul’s words about the ‘flesh’ they naturally thought

that he was talking about the body, and that gave them a handle on which to hang their own neuroses about their bodies.

p. 21

In the lives of all the great Christian saints, we find this distrust of the body. … It is now deeply implanted in the Western consciousness that the body has to be disciplined and controlled. … this punitive attitude towards the body and pride in physical discomfort is part of our Christian inheritance.

p. 23 – 24

The body is hated because it is sexual, and in a vicious circle this hatred of the body increases the Christian sexual disgust, for in sex

man is at his most physical and so furtherest from God. … the female

body was regarded with especial disgust and it was a source of deep embarrassment to the Fathers that Jesus was born of a woman. They laid great stress on the fact, in sermon after sermon, in treatise after treatise, that Mary remained a virgin not only before the birth of Christ but afterwards as well. Her hymen remained unbroken, her body remained sealed off and intact, unravaged by the mess and bloody violence of childbirth. ‘ To embrace a woman’, wrote Odo of Cluny in the 12th century, ‘is to embrace a sack of manure.’ The messy and mysterious innards of a woman with her voracious womb was particularly

filthy and the fathers wanted to make sure that Jesus had as little contact with this repulsive body as possible. … every Christmas women are expected to sing or listen to … the words from the Adesta Fideles, ‘Lo! he abhors not the Virgin’s womb’, as though through Christ’s tolerance of a woman’s body was an extraordinary concession on his part. The fact that we no longer even notice the words shows just how deeply they have found acceptance in our minds.

p. 24 -25

Augustine … ‘We ought not to condemn wedlock because of the evil of lust, but nor must we praise lust because of the good of wedlock.’ …

St Ambrose … ‘Virginity is one thing that keeps us from the beasts.’

…St Thomas of Aquinas …said that sex was always evil, but not always morally evil. … Luther … ‘No matter what praise is given to

marriage … I will not concede it to nature that it is no sin.’ …’How foul and horrible a thing sin is … for lust is the only thing that cannot be cured by any remedy! Not even by marriage, which was expressly ordained for this infirmity of our nature.’

p. 26

Original Sin … did not appear in its final form until the 4th century. In the Gospel Christ never once talks about the sin of Adam or about the effects of Original Sin in every one of us.He would probably have been rather startled by the doctrine as I have described

it. Jesus, of course, was Jewish, and even though the Book of Genesis

is a Jewish scripture there is nothing like the doctrine of Original Sin in Judaism. It is an entirely Christian invention. …When the story of Adam and eve was included in the Jewish scriptures, it was not at first seen by the Jews as an account of the First Sin in the Christian sense; for centuries it was considered a morally neutral myth.

p.29

There is absolutely no idea [in Judaism] that all men inherit an innate sinfulness which will damn them eternally in the torments of Hell unless God sends a Redeemer. Some Jews at the time of Christ were certainly waiting for a Messiah, but no Jew was waiting for a messiah to ‘take away the sins of the world’. …[Paul] did not mean that all men were literally condemned by the sin of Adam and ‘in’ him were lost and wallowing in a damned state. He never discusses the ways

that this Original Sin was passed on from one generation to another; he never discusses Eve’s part in the Fall and he never links ‘Original’ sin with sex. All these later developments were brought in by the Fathers of the Church during the four centuries of discussion and speculation.

p. 29 -30

The Western fathers interpreted the bible literally. … [they] were neurotic and emotional men …were all of a religious ‘type’ which inclined them towards fundamentalist, aggressive and anti-sexual theologies. …Once born Greek theologians, like Cyril of Alexandria, were developing far less frightening interpretations of the doctrine of Original Sin and were much less anti-sexual. For the western Fathers, like Augustine, sex and sin became inextricably entwined for reasons that were personal and peculiar to the time and place but which had no real warranty from the New Testament.

p. 31

Concupiscence means the desire man has, against all reason, to take pleasure in mere creatures instead of in God. … [it] is the essence of sin, because it makes us lose our reason and nowhere is the loss of

rational control more acutely felt than in sex.

p. 32 – 34

‘Away with thought’ Augustine cries in horror, ‘that there should have been any unregul;ated excitement or the need to resist desire!’ Adam did not ejaculate in pleasurable orgasm, Augustine insists, but his semen was as calmly and as pleasurelessly discharged as urine or menstrual blood. … sin sex and women are bound together in an unholy

trinity. … When Europe fell into the intellectual abyss of the Dark Ages, it was Augustine’s theology which dominated Christian thinking …

p. 35-37

The Penitentials (guides for the clergy about how to judge the various

sins of the faithful) show that in the early Middle Ages the Church was trying to enforce total abstinence on married couples. Sex was forbidden while a woman was pregnant, menstruating or breastfeeding, which was very prohibitive considering the extreme frequency of pregnancy, because, of course, contraception was forbidden. Sex was also forbidden during Lent and Advent, on Ember days and also on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It was also forbidden before receiving communion. By the time a virtuous couple had found a spare Tuesday which did not fall into any of these forbidden periods they were probably sexually paralysed. … There is evidence that the Church took some time to impose their sexual views on the laity and that the older, healthier pagan attitudes survived for some time, alongside the new Christian views.

p. 43

The Shakers …Mother Ann Lee … saw Adam and Eve copulating in the Garden of Eden, and realised that sex was the sin that had caused the fall. It must therefore be absolutely prohibited.

p. 49

[In Victorian times] … Sex was dangerous. It was even physically dangerous. A sexual disease called spermatorrhea was invented; whose symptoms were premature ejaculation, wet dreams and imperfect erections. It became the bogey of Victorian men. Any sexual activity which seemed beyond a man’s control became a symptom of this imaginary

illness … On the other hand, the Victorian sexologist Drysdale painted an equally terrifying picture of too much chastity. If a man didn’t get enough sex he could become dangerously ill or at least develop spermatorrhea and impotence, but it was a very fine line because too much sex was equally fatal. On no account must it occur more than twice a week, Drysdale decreed.

Next Chapter 2 – The Result : Eve