SEXUALITY DEFINED: JUDEO-CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES - THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION – THE BASIC VIEWES

Predictably enough, if even marital sex was suspect, other behaviors such as fornication, homosexuality, and adultery were even more heavily condemned. St. Basil, for example, held that fornicators should be excluded from the Sacrament for seven years, while adulterers as well as sodomists and bestialists should be excluded from the Sacrament for fifteen years.

Bullough (1976) summarizes the position of the early Christian Church in this manner:

Christians were, in spirit, if not always in practice, ascetics, and justifying sexual intercourse only in terms of progeny meant that any kind of sex not leading to reproduction had to be condemned. It also meant that, even when pregnancy resulted, sex was not something to be enjoyed. The church fathers regarded sex as at best something to be tolerated, an evil whose only good was in procreation. Western attitudes have been dominated by their concepts ever since.

During the next several centuries, these basic views were expanded by Church authorities. Thus, the Doctrine of Original Sin required a baptism in order to cleanse the infant of the sin committed in the conceptual act. A growing sentiment within the Church emerged, requiring celibacy on the part of the priesthood. Bodily urges were increasingly seen as the work of the devil, who was particularly active during sleep. Women came to be regarded as inferior beings and were to be "taken care of in terms of true Christian charity, because they were incapable of exercising mature and sound judgment. Above all, the antisexual values expressed by Paul, Augustine, and others became even more firmly established in Church doctrine.

To some extent, these views were moderated by later Church scholars. In particular, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) in Summa Theologica argued that if intercourse was not a proper human function as Augustine claimed, at least it might be justified as a "second class" perfection (Murstein, 1974). He then went on (despite his own lack of sexual experience) to offer a set of rules covering every aspect of sexuality from kissing to coitus, from incest to bestiality, from fantasies to wet dreams (Strong, 1978). In this manner, Aquinas identified a number of sexual vices, the worst being those acts which were directed solely to experiencing pleasure and which excluded procreation: masturbation, bestiality, homosexuality, and deviations from the natural manner of coitus, which, according to Aquinas, was restricted to face-to-face contact with the female on her back (male superior position). Such vices were considered to be sins against God, as constrasted with fornication, adultery, seduction, rape, and incest, which were sins against another individual.

The definitions of St. Thomas [Aquinas] tended to dominate all thinking on sexual subjects to the end of the Middle Ages with the result that any kind of sexual activity not leading to procreation could be classed as deviant whether it took place inside or outside of marriage.

*17\265\8*