Tag Archives: sex

Conjugal Debts

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The Church, the Bride of Christ, is born from his side when the blood and water pour forth from the lance-wound in his side, just as Eve was born from the side of Adam. As bride and groom, the Church and Christ can be said to owe each other a “conjugal debt” that is “paid” in the Eucharist. “Do you understand, then, how Christ has united his bride to himself and what food he gives us all to eat? By one and the same food we are both brought into being and nourished. As a woman nourishes her child with her own blood and milk, so does Christ unceasingly nourish with his own blood those to whom he himself has given life.” (St. John Chrysostom)

Let a man give to his wife what he owes her; similarly, a wife to her husband. A wife does not have authority over her body, her husband does; likewise, a husband does not have authority over his own body, his wife does. Do not deprive one another …. (1 Cor. 7:4-5)

Evidently the Corinthians had written a series of questions to St. Paul, some of them about marriage. In response, St. Paul writes a short treatise On Marriage in chapter 7 of First Corinthians. It was common for philosophers and later Christian theologians to write essays about the good and bad qualities of marriage; St. Augustine wrote an especially famous essay On the Good [Aspects] of Marriage.

Jewish tracts about marriage and pagan philosophers writing about marriage agree about the power of sexuality. St. Paul concurs with these ideas. The sexual relationship is at the heart of the marital relationship and the sexual availability each spouse owes the other came to be known as the “conjugal debt.” St. Paul writes that the spouses could agree to deny each other for short periods, so as to be better able to focus on prayer, but should never stay away from each other for long.

What is a “short” period? What is a “long” time? Jewish practice expected a married couple to abstain for one or two weeks each month because of the wife’s menstrual cycle. Soldiers and priests were expected to abstain during their times of active service–partly because they weren’t at home. Scholars of the Torah could abstain for a month but not longer; this meant they could not go away to distant libraries for months at a time. Ordinary workmen were not allowed to abstain for more than a week; this meant they had to come home every week if they had a job that required them to live away from home.

Early Christians expected that married couples who were fasting would also abstain from sexual activity; some manuscripts of First Corinthians read that couples should only abstain in order to engage in “prayer and fasting.” There were two fasting days each week and anyone receiving Holy Communion was expected to fast the night before as well. Converts preparing for baptism were expected to fast for three days. (This pre-baptismal fast is what became Holy Week and then Lent.)

St. Paul was not married. It was unusual for a Jewish man to not be married so a few people think he might have been a widower without children. Whether he had been married as a younger man or not, he urged the Corinthians to remain as they were when they converted: married or single or widowed. Stability of life–itself an important monastic virtue in the 6th century–was important to St. Paul. Such stability involved a stable homelife which included a stable reliance on the “payment” of the “conjugal debt.”

An Ancient Egyptian Health Plan?

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Crocodiles were associated with Sobek, a god responsible for pharaonic power, fertility, and military prowess, but served additionally as a protective deity with apotropaic qualities, invoked particularly for protection against the dangers presented by the Nile river.

Crocodiles were associated with Sobek, a god responsible for pharaonic power, fertility, and military prowess, but served additionally as a protective deity with apotropaic qualities, invoked particularly for protection against the dangers presented by the Nile river.

My current writing project is an academic book about Byzantine attitudes towards sexuality in the 4th–14th centuries. I found that the early Egyptian monks, as well as the later Byzantine monastic charters, insisted that there should be no female animals kept on monastic farms as the monks would be tempted to use them in untoward ways. This fear seemed exaggerated to me, so I did some checking to see how real the likelihood of bestiality was.

It turns out that bestiality was not only common in rural areas but was a part of pagan worship and folk magic. Egyptian gods were always depicted in animal form or as human-animal hybrids and Greco-Roman mythology described gods and goddesses assuming animal form to seduce humans. In northern Europe, heroes and royal families claimed to be descended from animal ancestors who bestowed their strength, cunning, and other abilities on the clan. Sex with certain animals was reported to heal certain diseases.

One example of the healing powers unleashed by acts of bestiality struck me in particular. In ancient Egypt, the god Sobek was depicted in alligator form and was said to have helped Isis collect the body parts of her son Horus and raise him from the dead as well as impregnating Isis and giving her into the protection of a “bask” or group of crocodiles. Because of this, sex with a crocodile was said to heal certain life-threatening diseases and the Egyptians developed a way of catching and then flipping a crocodile onto its back and restraining it so that it could not resist penetration. Clearly this form of bestiality was a large group activity and not something engaged in by a man ashamed and alone in the dark, though it is hard to imagine how terrible the disease must have been to drive people to resort to this as a cure!