Ian McDonald
THERE IS much for which to bless the Christian religion. It has, for instance, inspired poetry of intense and enduring beauty. I was reading John Donne the other day: his poem entitled "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward" is certainly worth a thousand Easter sermons on the theme of the Resurrection. And Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Wreck of the Deutschland" is a poem beside which most solemn Papal Encyclicals pale into banality.
But Christianity also has much for which it must answer, though by Christianity I do not mean the original teachings of that strange genius who appeared outside Jerusalem a couple of thousand years ago I mean the institutional Church which men who came after Jesus of Nazareth built and manipulated for their own, often cruel and benighted, purposes.
One of the more obvious results of institutional Christianity was the rapid establishment of sexual guilt as a norm in human behaviour. It is amazing, for instance, to observe the revolution which took place in the morals of ancient Rome with the onset of Christianity. The empress Messalina once challenged a leading courtesan in Rome to a contest and won it by having sexual congress with 25 men one after the other in a single prolonged session. This was public, not private, behaviour and society was not shocked. A couple of centuries later such public goings-on would have been unthinkable. A culture of sexual guilt had completely taken over from a culture of sexual indulgence. No happy balance was ever contemplated.
CARDINAL VIRTUE
It is strange when you come to think of it. The cardinal virtue celebrated in the New Testament is love, yet the cardinal virtue soon adopted by the Fathers of the Church was chastity, a very different thing.
In the crucial transitional time the theological argument was won by narrow-minded men. When, therefore, Christianity was established in Rome as the state religion a strict new morality prevailed. Sexual enjoyment, given a pre-eminent place in the pantheon of evil, became a crime to be severely punished. Inevitably, there was a vast increase in guilty feelings about perfectly normal sexual behaviour. All sense of proportion, all sense of humour, on the subject was abandoned so much so that there came a time when St. Clement could write in all seriousness: "Laughter is the prelude to fornication," and hundreds of ascetics, reacting perhaps against mixed bathing in the old Roman baths, decided never ever to wash themselves again!
The trouble was that men like St. Paul got hold of the original teachings and distorted them. Jesus, after all, went on the record as saying that prostitutes have as good a chance of getting to Heaven as anyone else. Paul would have repudiated such an outrage. To an adulteress Jesus said, "Neither do I condemn thee." The very best Paul could manage was to agree reluctantly that it was better to marry than to burn with lust. For him lust was the sin of sins and he loathed it obsessively.
Paul's hatred of the flesh contrasts sharply with the relaxed attitude of Jesus. Unfortunately, however, Paul was a more influential figure in the history of Christianity than Christ, with the result that Western man for century after century suffered torments of conscience about perfectly natural sexual desires. Christian leaders through the ages would certainly have excommunicated Christ for being much too permissive.
The ascetic fanatics who hijacked Christianity in its formative years devalued normal sexuality and therefore succeeded in splitting off virtue from a large part of everyday joy and happiness. Their victory was an unhappy day for ordinary men and women. In historical terms it is only very recently that the rigid grip of this misguided sexual orthodoxy has relaxed a little. And there are ominous signs from the Vatican itself, not to mention born-again zealots, that such relaxation will not be tolerated. A backlash is in the making that would certainly thrill the withered old heart of killjoy St. Paul. The actual founder of the faith himself must be smiling ruefully as he surveys the passing scene and sees what he never intended - disgust replace delight as a test of virtue.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
