But Church Teaching ...

Ascetic Dualism and Concupiscence

Certain of the early church fathers were influenced by philosophical thinking known as "ascetic dualism" ultimately traceable to certain works of Plato, which continued through later Greek Stoic philosophers and was prevalent in Imperial Roman society. This thinking created a strict division between body and soul, and regarded truth as an objective reality which philosophers were searching for. It was linked to a psychological model in which reason was expected to dominate the mind (in fact, to have complete control over the emotions) and much that people have always valued, such as beauty, poetry, pleasure and emotional satisfaction were regarded as distractions from the path to the truth. The body and the emotions were considered to be inferior to the soul and to reason, and virtuous people were supposed to have complete mastery over their feelings in all contexts. Feeling, and in particular, sexual feeling, was labelled "concupiscence" and regarded as sinful.

This approach is completely alien to Judaic culture, and therefore sits uncomfortably with the Hebrew scriptures and much of the New Testament. In addition, it is a style of thinking which has long been severely criticised in Western culture. Not only are pleasure, feelings and, above all, love, valued in modern society, but modern psychological models hold that it is not healthy or even possible to try to subject all emotions to the control of reason.

The implications of this thinking during the early years of the church were, of course, to create hostility against all sexual activity, and particularly heterosexual activity. The church was, until the seventeenth century, extremely hostile to marriage. Entry into marriage was fatal to any aspirations to an ecclesiastical career and a complete bar to sainthood. The leading proponents of this kind of thinking, such as Tertullian, St Augustine and St Jerome all show in their writing an irrational hostility to women, and an obsession with women's sexuality. Modern readers will tend to see this as the effect of an unhealthy attempt to suppress their own sexual feelings towards women. These kinds of attitudes are considered unacceptable in modern society and are in sharp contrast to the respect for women shown by Jesus Christ as he appears in the gospels.