Mysteries of the Middle Ages

by Thomas Cahill

  In a world of competitive strivers, each of whom meant to excel all others, envy and Schadenfreude were the warp and woof of daily experience, and collective violence—one group determined to get rid of another—was a common occurrence in the life of Greco-Roman cities. The ancient Greek ideal of combative personal excellence, combined with more primeval urges to familial and tribal dominance, almost ensured the periodic eruption of urban riots and interethnic carnage—and this despite the fact that late classical philosophy stressed that the good life must be a life devoid of uncontrollable passion. Apatheia was the thing to strive for; and though the word turns into apathy in English, its original Greek meaning is “passionless balance, calm equipoise.” But, hey, not everybody was a philosopher.

  The Greeks had gone through several stages in their approach to human emotion. In the ancient lore, the passions that overcome us, especially anger and lust, are gods that possess us and that we must submit to. But at least from the sixth century B.C.—from the time of Plato’s predecessor, Pythagoras—there was an alternative doctrine, taught by a minority of Greek sages who saw uncontrollable passion as an antisocial evil and insisted it was possible to overcome such passion by a strict regimen of life, which could be mastered by dedicated disciples. Such disciples gathered in communities under a revered teacher and practiced techniques of self-denial that enabled their will to control their emotions. To us, such quiet, introspective communities would have seemed rather like monasteries (and there is even some reason to think that the earliest of them, the Pythagorean conventicles of Sicily, may have been modeled on the practices of Indian religious movements, such as late Hinduism and early Buddhism, that invented the world’s first monasteries).

  There can be no doubt, however, that the vast majority of men and women have never been particularly attracted to monasticism in any form. Pythagorean and Platonic communities, as well as the Stoic communities that developed later—about the time Jewish scholars were gathering at Alexandria to translate their holy books into Greek—were the object at times of awe but often of hostility from ordinary people who found spiritual asceticism alien or even unattractive. Most people knew in their bones that they, at any rate, would never gain control over their emotions and could only respect or resent those who claimed to be able to do so. The tranquil apathics, for their part, could be chilly and contemptuous toward ordinary people and their flotsam-and-jetsam lives.

  Though we may view the self-denying practices of this minority through the lens of later monasticism, picturing the apathics as pagan monks and nuns, there is no way to view the generality of Greco-Roman sexual attitudes through any lens in our modern repertoire. For one thing, Death was so present to the ancients that his name resounded through their streets with numbing frequency. The average life span was twenty-five years, and only four men in a hundred—and far fewer women—lived to celebrate their fiftieth birthday. Infants and children expired like fireflies in the night. This was a society, in the words of Peter Brown, “more helplessly exposed to death than is even the most afflicted underdeveloped country in the modern world.” For the population to remain stable, let alone grow, each woman had to produce five children in the course of her short life; and since not all women would prove fertile or long-lived enough to do so, others had to make up the deficit in the death-defying task of population replacement.

  Only when we take into account the constant presence of Death can we come to understand the uses of sex among the ancients. The Jewish obsession with generativity—God’s primeval command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply,” God’s promise to Abraham that his seed would be countless as the stars in the sky—finds many echoes in the classical world, where the principal role of an upstanding man was to engender children of his body and protect their lives insofar as he could, while the role of a woman was to bear those children and rear them to adulthood. But whereas the Jews developed a fairly straightforward morality of sex—men are obliged to marry and perpetuate the race, women to be obedient and faithful—the Greeks and Romans inhabited a society that came to permit somewhat more elastic options.

  Ethnicity as such had none of the mystical meaning for Greeks and Romans that it had for Jews, enjoined to raise up God-fearing children for Israel. Obligation for Greeks and Romans was not to the nation but to the city. The free adult male, if he meant to be of any consequence, was required to exhibit in his stately carriage and resonant voice the natural sense of command, the graced aura of unquestioned authority that triggered knee-jerk submission from all lesser beings, whether lower-class males, women, children, horses, hounds, or slaves. In an age free from all media magic—the tricked-up images of television and advertising, the spin doctors controlling the way we perceive our leaders—a man was more likely to be who he seemed to be, the ensouled body that presented itself to our senses. His physical presence either exuded authority or did not. It was harder to hide behind Wizard of Oz manipulations.

  By means of genuine leaders, human magnets who actually drew others to themselves by the visual and aural magic of corporeal attraction, the polis, the city, the impressive civic entity that the Greco-Roman world saw as its greatest achievement, could be saved from sundering and chaos. The city was not unlike the human body, fragile, tempted to excess, vulnerable to disease. Its unpredictable swings and irrational tides needed to be kept in check by a spiritual principle, a Logos of its own—the controlling male intelligence.

  The human body, an iffy thing, easily undone, was yet the acme of the beauty of the cosmos. No wonder that a male on the cusp of full manhood was the loveliest thing in the universe, repeatedly portrayed in statuary and fresco, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,” desirable by all, whether female or male (though completely possessable by none), whose hot blood beat against the walls of his body, seeking release, turning to white foam and spurting from his engorged penis—“a human Espresso machine,” as Brown calls him. The first spurt of the adolescent male was celebrated by his family at the Roman Feast of the Liberalia on March 17. It was, of course, but the first of many, for the achieved male body was a furnace of fire that required repeated release from inner pressure.

  The female body, on the other hand, was visibly deficient. In her mother’s womb, the female had received insufficient heat, so she was softer, more liquid, underdone. Periodic menstruation proved that she was not fiery enough to burn up her excess liquids, which would nonetheless come in time to supply the nurturing wetland for the hot male seed that must be implanted within her. Were it not for this providential usefulness of her excess, we would have to conclude that she was simply a mutilated male, wrote Galen, the Greek physician of the second century whose pronouncements would exercise unparalleled influence over natural philosophy and medical practice well into modern times. (Because the treatises of Galen and other Greek physicians would come at last into the hands of medieval healers like Hildegard of Bingen and Roger Bacon, Greek is still the technical language of Western medicine.)

  Galen was full of convictions. He knew only too well the differences between men and women. Why, hadn’t his own father been “the most just, the most devoted, and the kindest of men,” the model Greco-Roman paterfamilias? “Mother, however, was so very prone to anger that sometimes she bit her handmaids!” That Father’s gracious calm might have issued from his civic and domestic omnipotence, whereas Mother’s irascible outbursts might be laid at the door of her total powerlessness, would never have occurred to Galen, who was convinced (as were most of his readers ever after) that he knew just about all there was to know about Nature, whether physical or psychological.

  Physicians like Galen counseled their patients to moderation (one could spurt too often), even to periodic celibacy (in the case of athletes who needed to bank their fires for the contest ahead), but never to a life of complete sexual renunciation.f Before a male took up the duties of full citizenship, he was allowed to discharge his excessive heat as he wished, so long as he didn’t, in Cicero’s
words, “undermine [another citizen’s] household”—by adultery with the citizen’s wife. Once he became paterfamilias in his own right, his sexual affairs—usually with house slaves of either sex, whose bodies he owned—needed to be carried on discreetly. Condemnation of those who were openly and carelessly self-indulgent was a matter not of morals but of breeding. For to spend too much time tending to the needs of one’s body “in much exercise, in much eating, drinking, much evacuating the bowels, and much copulating” was, in the severe opinion of Epictetus the Stoic, who died a few years before Galen was born, “a mark of lack of refinement.”

  Ancient Greek science and Greco-Roman philosophy, though replete with insights and discoveries that have served mankind, were partly dependent on the biases of their practitioners, as no doubt are science and philosophy in any age of the world. Ancient medicine, in particular, depended on the observations of highly prejudiced, supremely privileged males, who alone were free to speak aloud and who wrote all the books—from high-minded marriage manuals (in which well-born wives were seen to be sufficiently educable by thoughtful husband-instructors as to be given eventual control over their households) to scurrilous pornography (in which low-born women were seen to be throwaway playthings). But the focus of attention was never a female of any sort but the urbane man of affairs, whose bounden duty was to orchestrate the pageant of his domestic life with such taut refinement and graceful superiority that he could be trusted to go on, according to Plutarch’s stuffy Maxims for Marriage, to “harmonize state, forum, and friends.”

  Pleasure, seldom an articulated motive among ancient Jews, was of conscious importance to Greeks and Romans, for whom visual, gustatory, and tactile pleasures were both the lifetime work of many artisans—architects, artists, musicians, chefs, trainers, masseurs, and courtesans—and the subjects of extensive philosophical commentary. Hardly puritanical, Greco-Roman caution about sex concerned the possibly all-consuming tyranny of pleasure, not its extirpation. But when in the second century we reach the first Christian treatises on sex, we are shocked to hear a new tune altogether. Clement of Alexandria, urban gentleman, Christian convert, and Galen’s contemporary, concedes that the best pagans have had admirable goals: “The human ideal of continence—as set forth by the Greek philosophers, that is—teaches one to resist passion, so as not to become its slave, and to train the instincts in the pursuit of rational goals.” All well and good. But, adds Clement on behalf of his fellow Christians, “our ideal is not to feel desire at all.”

  By Zeus, how’s that?

  Like Philo, Clement is a religious apologist, setting forth arguments meant to convince readers of the superiority of his way over other courses of life. Just as Philo had borrowed concepts from pagan philosophy and interpretive techniques from pagan literary criticism, Clement borrows from pagan manuals of manners. Christians had been tarnished with every slander imaginable: they were cannibals (because of the Eucharist), practitioners of free love (because of their custom of embracing one another warmly), atheists (because of their refusal to sacrifice to the gods). Clement’s task is to show that Christians are even more refined and high-minded than the most exquisite pagan.

  The compleat Christian’s manners are impeccable: he does not slobber over food nor “besmear [his] hands with the condiments,” nor is he ever “amazed and stupefied at what is presented,” however “vulgar” and extravagant the dishes may be, for he has already partaken of “the rich fare which is in the Word.” You can always recognize the true Christian by his admirable comportment: he eats and drinks but little and “commits no indecorum in the act of swallowing”; his burps are inaudible, his farts undetectable; he wouldn’t think of laughing—too coarse, altogether—but smiles his gentle smile. His chin is never greasy. If “attacked with sneezing” or with hiccups, the Christian does not “startle those near him with the explosion and so give proof of his bad breeding” but “quietly transmits” his sneeze or hiccup “with the expiration of the breath, the mouth being composed becomingly, and not gaping and yawning like the tragic masks.” “Snorting” is unthinkable. The Christian woman is no “ape smeared with white paint,” nor does she “season the flesh like a pernicious sauce” nor dye her hair yellow as if she were some Northern barbarian “nor stain her cheeks nor paint her eyes.”

  “In a word, the Christian is characterized by composure, tranquility, calm, and peace,” writes Clement. In a word, my religion is classier than your religion—and the Christian alone fulfills the Greco-Roman ideal of the balanced, always-in-control public man, steadily reigning above all fitfulness. As a householder, he shrewdly oversees his extensive properties, knowing that Christ did not intend that he sell everything he has and give it to the poor, even if that’s what Jesus actually said in the gospels. (He was being metaphorical, of course. He meant only that one should not set one’s heart on the things of this world.) Naturally, the ideal Christian has done his duty by the city and engendered children of his body, but in old age he devotes himself as a wise church elder to higher things, having put away the passions—though he may be permitted just a cup or two more of wine in the evenings than would be appropriate for the hotblooded young.

  Clement is easy to caricature and even to dislike—till we take notice of what he was fighting against. For impassioned movements were swirling around the Christian church that struck Clement as even more barbaric than a Greek lady dyeing her hair yellow. The Encratites (or Retaining Ones or Those Who Do Not Spill Over) had given up sex altogether, believing that only in this way could they bring the world to an end and usher in the Second Coming of Christ. They were sweaty, ignorant, underbred, and intolerant and had brought their peculiar notions with them from the hinterlands of (God help us) Syria. But as convinced fundamentalists often do, they impressed simpleminded souls with their simple rules: give up sex, go to Heaven. Their way, if taken up wholesale by Christian communities, would, as Clement saw it, result only in Christianity’s extinction.

  The Gnostics were at the other end of the spectrum, always whispering among themselves about secret knowledge available to the select few, teachings Jesus had passed on only to his most intimate associates that treated of the evil nature of creation and the evil hopelessness of the human body. Why, did you know, Jesus hadn’t even been human, just appeared to take on flesh, not unlike a Greek god? Christ the Logos, after all, could never have united himself to the, ugh, material world. The Gnostics, too, tended to favor total abstinence from sex, though rather less vociferously than the Encratites; at times it seemed as if they favored doing whatever you liked, so long as you didn’t get caught. Whatever the case—and it was difficult to know exactly what the heads-in-the-clouds Gnostics were talking about—neither Gnostics nor Encratites were interested in the wonders of the world as it was: the sun-dappled familial peace and richly embroidered civic life that were the protected pride of Greco-Roman civilization. Both groups would gladly look upon the collapse of the world that Clement loved, and it was as much against them both as against the slandering pagans that he took up his quill.

  ALUMNI OF ALEXANDRIA

  POLITICIANS ĐEATH

  Alexander the great,

  FOUNDER 323 B.C.

  Ptolemy Soter,

  FIRST RULER, FOUNDER OF THE MOUSEION AND THE LIBRARY 283 B.C.

  Ptolemy Philadelphus,

  SECOND RULER, COMMISSIONER OF THE SEPTUAGINT 246 B.C.

  Cleopatra VII,

  LAST RULER

  (TILL THE ROMAN CONQUEST) 30 B.C.

  MATHEMATICIANS AND SCIENTISTS ĐEATH

  Euclid,

  MATHEMATICIAN early third century B.C.

  Erasistratus,

  PHYSICIAN mid-third century B.C.

  Eratosthenes,

  ASTRONOMER, GEOGRAPHER c. 194 B.C.

  Claudius Ptolemy,

  ASTRONOMER, GEOGRAPHER, AUTHOR OF THE PTOLEMAIC MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE c. 178 B.C.

  Galen,

  PHYSICIAN A.D. 99

  PHILOSOPHERS AND THEOLOGIA
NS ĐEATH

  Philo,

  JEWISH SCRIPTURE SCHOLAR AND PHILOSOPHER C. A.D. 45

  Clement,

  CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHER C. A.D. 213

  Origen,

  CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE SCHOLAR AND THEOLOGIAN A.D. 254

  Plotinus,

  PAGAN PHILOSOPHER A.D. 270

  Arius,

  HERETICAL CHRISTIAN THEOLOGIAN A.D. 336

  CHURCHMEN ĐEATH

  Athanasius,

  BISHOP, OPPONENT OF ARIUS A.D. 373

  Cyril,

  BISHOP, INCITER OF MOB VIOLENCE A.D. 444

  In the eyes of Clement, who had been raised a Stoic and continued to teach characteristically stoical attitudes after his conversion, Christianity was available to save the best of Greco-Roman life and make it even better.g But his view was soon to become a minority one. His successor as head of Alexandria’s famed Catechetical School was an earnest scholar in his early thirties, Origen, a contemporary of Plotinus who, like him, believed in the eternal preexistence of the human soul but who wrote with a clarity and precision Plotinus could not touch. Origen, a theological prodigy, wiped the floor with the airheaded Gnostics. But the tenderhearted young man also believed that at the end of time even the most evil of beings—the bloodiest tyrants, Satan himself—would be redeemed, a position unacceptable to orthodoxy. Origen was, for all his clarity, an emotional extremist: at twenty, he had had himself surgically castrated, a fearful violence against the erotic self that could claim no place in Clement’s poky philosophy. Worse was to come.