SEX AND SIN

TO MANY Christians Aids has come in the nick of time to save their crumbling faith in sexual morality. For decades now they have seen others indulge their vices with impunity. They got away with them not just here on earth but, with doubts about the existence of hell, it began to look as if they would go unpunished in the hereafter as well. Now, although there was no prophet to call down the plague on these sinners as Moses did on the Egyp- tians, the promiscuous were finally getting their comeuppance. This reaction was condemned by the leaders of the Christian churches. The Anglican Bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, thought it 'quite wrong to ascribe Aids to the wrath of God'; and Cardinal Hume, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, wrote that something much more radical and con- structive is called for than the scourging of other people's vices'. Both bishops shared a reluctance to define and denounce sexual sins. The Anglican found it hard to con- demn homosexuals to life-long celibacy: Cardinal Hume suggested no more than that the 'Judaeo-Christian heritage of mor- al values still has much to offer contempor- ary society . . .'. He called for a simpler, healthier life. 'We are already changing deep-rooted habits in eating, drinking, smoking, exercise. How much greater is the necessity to rediscover the joy of faithful love and lasting marriage.'

Both these statements by Church leaders showed how defensive Christians had be- come about their concept of sexual moral- ity. It may no longer be surprising to find an Anglican bishop implicitly condoning the sins of Sodom: but for a Catholic cardinal to compare the Christian ideal of marriage to jogging and eating wholemeal bread showed the extent to which confi- dence in the traditional teaching had been shaken by the sexual revolution. Gone was St Paul's assured prediction in his Epistle to the Romans that men who do 'shameless things' with men would get 'an appropriate reward for their perversion'.

Selling the strict sexual morality of the Christian religion has never been easy. The human heart is by nature inconstant. In- fidelity was always a favourite theme in theatre, opera, poetry and fiction. It was the most excusable of sins. 'Man strives and in his striving errs,' wrote Goethe. 'Cosi fan tutte,' said Mozart. Promiscuity, wrote Henri de Montherlant, 'is not just man's most natural instinct, it is also his most reasonable instinct. I have picked an apple; I found it good. I want another: nothing is more reasonable than to pick that too.'

What seems odd today is that the Christ- ian ethic survived for -so long. It seems particularly incongruous if we consider that it originates not in the sayings of Christ nor in the commandments of Moses, but in the mythical account of creation in the Book of Genesis. In this God makes man in his own likeness and then, deciding 'that it is not good that the man should be alone', takes one of his ribs and from it makes a creature of complementary gender. 'This at last is bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh,' says the man. 'This is to be called woman, for this was taken from man.'

To the modern agnostic, this passage of Genesis has no greater significance than any other myth. Christians, however, must accept the specific endorsement of Christ himself who forbade divorce, which Moses had permitted, on the authority of this account of man's condition. 'Have you not read,' he said, 'that the creator from the beginning made them male and female, and that he said: This is why a man must 'leave father and mother, and cling to his wife, and the two become one body? They are no longer two, therefore, but one body.' So; then, what God has united, God must not divide.'

Thus sex is God's glue. To make love is to marry, to marry is to make love. To dissociate the two is to frustrate God's intention. But it would appear from Gene- sis that there is more to fix the joint than the glue. The two halves are shaped physically and psychologically to fit together. A woman is made for man as a nut is for a bolt, and as a punishment for original sin her subjection is made irk- some. 'Your yearning shall be for your husband, yet he will lord it over you.'

This subordination of women to men once formed a necessary part of Christian teaching on the bond between the two sexes. St Paul would not allow women to teach or 'tell a man what to do', because, he told Timothy, 'Adam was first formed and Eve afterwards . . .'. The bond be- tween a husband and his wife he saw as a `mystery with many implications'. 'Wives', he wrote to the Ephesians, 'should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is the husband the head of his wife; and as the Church submits to Christ, so should wives to their hus- bands, in everything . .

To the modern mind this teaching of St Paul seems obnoxious, and it is the embar- rassed attitude of Church leaders towards this apostle which helps to explain their confusion over sexual morality. He stands like a pugnacious challenger of the easy- going egalitarian values of the liberal democracies, and our sanitised, sen- timentalised image of Christ. It is not just that his views on the status of women offend the feminists: his intolerance of error undermines ecumenicism; his indif- ference towards the Roman oppression of the Jews implicitly refutes liberation theo- logy; and his castigation of homosexuals and adulterers seems like 'the scourging of other people's vices' which Cardinal Hume deplores.

But it is difficult to dismiss the teaching of St Paul without dismantling the Christ- ian religion. His vision on the road to Damascus comes second only to the Resur- rection itself as a seminal epiphany. For 19 centuries no one has questioned the divine inspiration of his epistles. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, all accepted them as the word of God. As late as 1930, Pope Pius XI, in an encyclical on Christian marriage, appealed to the authority of the apostle to denounce the 'pernicious errors and degraded morals' of the modern era.

Seeing the approach of the sexual re- volution, this old Pope reminded Roman Catholics that every conjugal act had an eternal significance. He warned against `rebellious concupiscence', denounced abortion, contraception and divorce as 'intrinsically evil', and rejected temporary liaisons as 'monstrosities'. He also con- demned the 'false teachers' who attack 'the loyal and honourable obedience of the wife to her husband' and 'blatantly proclaim or demand the emancipation of women . . Such demands for equality, he wrote, are `pretentious and exaggerated'. The essen- tial order of the home was constituted by the authority and wisdom of God himself, and 'neither the laws of the state nor the good pleasure of individuals can ever 4 In retreating before feminism . . . the teaching on sexual morality became dangerously exposed change it'.

What he feared above all was that the illusory benefits of emancipation would lure women away from their duties in the home. For a mother with young children to pursue a career, he wrote,

is a degradation of the spirit of woman and of the dignity of a mother; it is a total perver- sion of family life, depriving the husband of his wife, the children of their mother and the home and the family of their ever-watchful guardian. If she abdicates the royal throne upon which the Gospel has set her in the home, she will soon find herself reduced (in reality if not in appearance) to the slavery of ancient days, and will become, what she was among the heathen, nothing more than the tool of her husband.

It was not the fear of hell but the fear of pregnancy which made these ethics of antiquity plausible well into the 20th cen- tury. By and large it remained true that women depended upon men for their livelihood, and few men were prepared to take on a woman who had (or might have) another man's baby. 'Men are induced to labour for the maintenance and education of their children', wrote David Hume, 'by the persuasion that they are really their own; and therefore 'tis reasonable, and even necessary, to give them some security in this particular.' To Dr Johnson, too, 'the confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime of adultery'.

As the 20th century progressed, how- ever, both the buttresses to Christian sexual morality collapsed. Women became able to earn their own living and control their own fertility. The reaction of the Christian churches varied. The Methodists and Anglicans accepted birth control and moved towards the ordination of women. The Catholic Church still insisted that women could not be priests, and that artificial contraception was wrong, but the teaching that a wife must submit to her husband was quietly forgotten. Yet in retreating before feminism, while trying to hold a line against contraception, the teaching on sexual morality became dangerously exposed. Hitherto sex had been seen as only one aspect of the partnership between a man and a woman — one element in a complex of social, emotional and practical commit- ments which had at their centre the inter- dependence of a man and his wife. Not only were children necessary to their well- being in old age, but both a man and a woman relied upon one another for par- ticular services and skills. Often in the past, a man without a woman to keep house could barely survive. Now, in the developed economies of the Western world, there was no longer any economic basis to the partnership and there was a tacit acceptance of the feminist hypothesis that there was no latent psycho- logical predisposition to the old inter- dependence between man and women. Marriage therefore became an expression of erotic attachment and emotional choice which was felt subjectively as love — a word as emotive and imprecise as it is frequently used, but which gained common currency in the modern era as a heady but fickle emotion, an egoirme a deux, whose expression through sex was the high point of human existence.

It was easy, after the development of effective contraception, to blur the mean- ing of eros and agape, and to extend the command to love one's neighbour to in- clude indulging his desires. Yet sexual passion was if anything the antithesis to Christian love. Its expression was self- fulfilment, not self-denial: its object rap- ture, not the Cross. Yet so prevalent by the mid-20th century was the notion that this blend of psychological obsession and erotic intoxication was of paramount importance that the Church itself was attacked for its inhumanity in refusing to sanction second marriages or give the sacraments to the divorced.

Because it was Christ himself who had ruled that the man or woman who remar- ries commits adultery, it was impossible for the Church to change its mind on divorce: but because there were no specific sayings of his on the other sexual sins, it became possible to argue that adultery was the only serious sexual sin. There were, of course, the sayings of St Paul but, by apparently dismissing what he had said about the status of women, the Church itself had in effect undermined the authority of his teaching on chastity.

The irony of this retreat before feminism Was that it did not seem to spring from conviction but from the innocence and timidity of the pastors — particularly those who were celibate in the Catholic Church. There was no convincing theological reason for the Church to change its mind. The intellectual arguments in favour of the equality of the sexes were all based upon secular premises, and had been advanced in the most part by those with no experi- ence of either Christian faith or family life. Moreover if the Church had looked for evidence to corroborate St Paul's teaching on the status of women, it would have found it in numerous secular sources. Even the apostle of fethinism, Simone de Beauvoir, acknowledged that no genius was to be found among women. For her the individuals who seem to us most outstanding, who are honoured by the hame of genius, are those who have proposed to enact the fate of all humanity in their personal existences, and no woman has believed herself authorised to do this'.

De Beauvoir, of course, did not consider that this shortcoming came from women's subordinate status in the order of creation. She ascribed it to 'the general mediocrity of their situation'; but the evidence she presented could equally well be used to support a literal interpretation of St Paul's teaching — that man, being God's original creation, and made in his image and likeness, has an androgynous potential that woman, being taken from man, does not. In literature it would explain why no woman novelist had created a character of the opposite sex to rival Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary. In theological terms it would explain why a woman cannot be a priest. She is quite right to feel that she is not authorised to enact the fate of all humanity. Only a man, particularly a man who had shed his erotic nature through celibacy, can take on the role of the Son of Man.

More convincing, perhaps, than the cultural evidence of Simone de Beauvoir were the practical observations of marriage therapists like H. A. Dicks and A. C. Robin Skynner. In his classic work, Marital Tensions, Dicks wrote that there must be a clear and definite sense of sexual identifica- tion in both husband and wife. The hus- band must protect and provide for his family while 'the woman's identity is typi- cally linked with cherishing, nourishing, maternal functions towards his children for him. Few marriages can endure when these Primary biological tasks are completely denied, or even if some of the secondary roles deriving from them are too flagrantly reversed.'

A. C. Robin Skynner, after 20 years of clinical experience, concluded, in One Flesh, Separate Persons, that 'the optimal pattern for family function is one in which the father in general accepts the ultimate responsibility and the authority that goes with it'. Along with other Marriage therap- ists, he had discovered that 'women, even before they have children, so frequently express in therapy a desire for a man who will be a match for them; the persistent provocation they so frequently offer when this is not the case, and their pleasure and relaxation when the provocation succeeds and "the worm turns" . .

Other writers seemed to vindicate a point made by Pius XI that the so-called emancipation of women would prove to be no emancipation at all. 'The real lesson to be learned from societies that give women equality of rights', wrote the American Steven Goldberg in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, 'and from those that give women respect, is twofold: males attain positions of authority and high status no matter what rights are given to women; and a reduction in the status and respect given to the roles which only women can fill forces women who desire status to compete in areas in which males' greater motivation is a precondition for attain- ment, and reduces the respect given to 4 Few parents dare object when they find their daughter's latest boyfriend at the breakfast table them.' The triumph of feminism has changed 'a woman's situation from one in which she cannot lose to one in which she cannot win.'

Ivan Illich, too, wrote in his book Gender that human society functions prop- erly only when 'men and women collective- ly depend on each other: their mutual dependence sets limits to struggle, ex- ploitation and defeat'. Illich blamed the insatiable demands of modern economies for the destruction of the delicate balance between the genders.

The feminist was the capitalist's stooge. The liberation of women had thrown them into a pool of cheap labour, and when any government now de- cided to enforce sexual equality, the best hope for women was that the laws should prove ineffective. 'Up to now wherever equal rights were equally enacted and enforced, wherever partner- ship between the sexes became stylish, these innovations gave a sense of accom- plishment to the elites who proposed and obtained them, but left the majority of women untouched, if not worse off than before.'

It is this public and economic exploita- tion of women which is found on a personal and intimate scale in the promiscuous sexual relationships of individuals. Where men had authority over women they also took responsibility for them. A girl was protected from sexual marauders by her father and by her brothers until the time came for a husband to exercise the same authority and take the same care. The father could be confident that there was a link between his daughter's allure and her well-being. The man who was to benefit from her youth and beauty would also care for her when she was wrinkled and old.

Now few parents dare object when they find their daughter's latest boyfriend at the breakfast table, because they have come to accept that she is equal and free. Perhaps her father is sleeping with his liberated secretary, or her brother with one of her liberated friends. Even her mother may believe in the wisdom of some sexual experience for, with sex at the centre of marriage, a wife need no longer be a virgin but she must be good in bed.

All this is to pervert the significance of sex in terms of eternity. If a man's love for his wife is God's love for his Church, it must show the same qualities of sanctity, fidelity and fruitfulness. To deny or to pervert them is to sin, and the wages of sin is death — not the death of the body from an incurable disease but the death of the soul in hell.

This teaching is clear, but the teachers themselves now seem to baulk at this justification for a Christian sexual morality. They return time and again to the easier but false justification that sex is only immoral if it is unhealthy, or if it harms one's fellow man. They are caught in a trap which they have set for themselves by suggesting that you can love God only through loving your neighbour.

This may make it easier for agnostics to see a point to religion, but it inevitably diminishes the role played by God. Few can now conceive of serving him except through adding to the pleasure or allevia- ting the pain of other human beings. The ascetic like St Simeon Stylites who spends his life in prayer on the top of a pillar appears absurd. Fasting makes no sense unless the food is given to the poor. Right and wrong must be susceptible to a material evaluation. Nothing is intrinsically good, and therefore nothing intrinsically evil.

It is this corruption of Christian teaching which makes the churches dither about the significance of Aids. Where tolerance and benevolence are our paramount virtues, and no third party seems harmed, it becomes impossible to condemn the old sexual sins; and where egalitarianism is established as a dominant dogma, it be- comes dangerous to preach the subordina- tion of women. Nothing is now said to defend the authority 'of a husband, and little about the holiness of procreation. Instead fidelity competes with condoms as the best method for safe sex. We worry only about our physical health and ignore Christ's advice in the Gospel of St Matthew 'to fear not those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell'.