Sexegesis
Sexegesis
Thanks to Randy Gorringe and Jim Erickson for breaking Catholic omertà and actually talking about our psycho-sexual training as seminarians. I’m relieved to hear that Randy’s Rhet’67 class received three different sex education sessions. That’s exactly three more than we ever did. Of course, learning the science of sex is not the same thing as unlearning the sinfulness of it, and that’s where they got us.
Jim had the best solution to the Promise of Celibacy I’ve ever heard. Just leave all the promise words out of the document.
In my ongoing quest to discover the historical roots of my own Irish Catholic sexual programming, I recently decided to re-read the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. It’s quite enlightening. God creates this beautiful garden in Eden, and in the middle are two trees, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God tells Adam he can eat from any of the trees in the garden except the tree of knowledge. That means that Adam could have eaten from the tree of life and gotten instant immortality, and that would have been fine with God. But the tree of knowledge? That was an absolute no-no!
The serpent in the garden is described as the “craftiest” of all the God’s animals. Eve is evidently attracted by his craftiness, so she consults him about this tree of knowledge business. The serpent tells her that the only reason God doesn’t want her eating from that tree is because it would make her “like God.” Eve thinks to herself, “well why shouldn’t I be like God?” So she eats from the tree of knowledge, and, blam! she gets the knowledge. Immediately she wants to share it with Adam “Dude, take a hit of this stuff!” So there you have it: The original mistake, later called Original Sin.
It occurs to me that the author of Genesis must have had a pretty marginal father. I mean, he paints Yahweh as this insecure parent who doesn’t want His kids to grow up for fear they might know what He knows. He wants to “protect” them. A more enlightened father might have applauded his kids’ curiosity and spunk, recognized them as chips off the old block. He might have taken them out for a beer and celebrated their emerging adulthood. But what does Yahweh do? He gets all pissed off and kicks them out of the house for disobeying Him! And tells them their life’s going to be shit.
They definitely struck some kind of nerve with Him.
Here’s what I don’t get though. The original beef Yahweh had with Adam and Eve was that they disobeyed Him, right? They committed a sin of disobedience. It had nothing to do with sex. So my question is: When did disobedience get all tangled up with sex? By the time of Augustine we’re being told that Original Sin is magically passed down to us through our parents’ act of intercourse.
Genesis tells us that, after eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve suddenly noticed they were naked and got all embarrassed. Does this mean that they “knew” each other in the biblical sense? And why would that make them embarrassed?
I guess we have to ask Augustine. He’s the one who sexualized the whole Adam and Eve story and made it catastrophic for all us kids in catechism class. Augustine’s a complex guy. Somewhere between his randy college days as a Manichaean and his scholarly days as a bishop he managed to fuse knowledge, disobedience and sex together. As a result, we Catholics all grew up with a lot of sexual guilt and a dearth of sexual knowledge. Which isn’t really fair. Either we ate the apple and should have gotten some knowledge out of it, or we didn’t, and shouldn’t have all this guilt. Just because Yahweh was a jealous father and Augustine was a college sex-addict, doesn’t mean we should have to go through life in a sexual Catch-22.
Needless to say, I would appreciate any insights you have on this issue.