Gut Reaction #7: Constant Erections and Bad Logic
How Augustine’s Issues Damn Us All. Plus—Luther’s Thrilling Toilet
From last time: …since the Church is always correct, surely it has a perfect, godly reason it baptizes babies…therefore, [Augustine] says:
That man is born with sin is shown from the baptism of infants…[and] from the words of the Apostle to the Romans and the Corinthians.
Proof! We are born with Original Sin because the Church already had that size sacrament in stock, and because someone said so in a bad translation.
A more recent, presidential example of this kind of logic: “The news is fake because so much of the news is fake.”
Episode #7
How constant erections and bad logic doomed us all. Plus Luther’s Thrilling Toilet!
…And then there are the erections. Original Sin helped Augustine understand his penis and why he was tormented by unwanted erections. He had fathered a son in his youth, but after his conversion, at age 31, he tried to think of a way for humans to procreate without the need for pleasure, hoping there was some hydraulic method by which a married couple could have sex with a mere genital “handshake” of sorts. (His image, not mine). He could control his arms, he complained—Why couldn’t he control all his “members”? (Paul also bemoaned his own free-range members.) Was there any hope? Here Augustine must have drawn from a bar trick witnessed in his youthful Carthage clubbing days: “Some people can make musical notes issue from the rear of their anatomy, so you would think they were singing.”
But somehow, his penis would not sing along. Augustine’s persistent erections, given his tireless, obsessive inward focus that makes this reader want to shove him outside and make him run miles in the woods and back to what’s real, lead into: I don’t want this forbidden, lustful erection, so why is it there? Why can’t I consciously control it? Why am I “wallowing in filth and scratching the itching sore of lust?” Where does this evil come from? Not from God! There must be something…something innately, uncontrollably wicked in me…maybe something I was born with…hmmm.
Original Sin also explained evil, an enormous theological problem in Christianity. When one’s solo, three-in-one deity is perfect like Yahweh—all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful—what accounts for evil? Yahweh couldn’t have created it, because he’s all good. If he’s all-powerful, why doesn’t he stop it? And on and on. Polytheism conveniently accounts for evil—there’s always a deity or two or twenty to create fear, evil, or a dark fate. And the ancients didn’t suffer the cognitive dissonance of being commanded to love those vexing deities with all their hearts and minds and souls, as Christians are called to do. Monotheistic Christianity pared down the human/divine relationship to just Yahweh and me (including Jesus and the Holy Spirit, but still One, of course. Mystery!). The Jews at least had the tribal pressure valve of Yahweh/We the Chosen People/Me, and often the tribe took the hit. But when it’s just Yahweh and Me, I must be to blame. No wonder Augustine is considered a primary source of the West’s regrettable obsession with individuality.
Early Catholicism was becoming “…A church set no longer to defy society but to master it,” as Professor Elaine Pagels quotes her colleague Peter Brown. Now that temporal leaders were baptized Christians, and were playing politics as much as previous pagan leaders, there had to be an excuse, and Original Sin fit nicely: Of course Christian leaders will falter. They’re born sinners, too, just like all of us.
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Five hundred years have gone by, at least since Luther and Calvin’s time, which wouldn’t automatically discount their work. But they constantly show themselves so heavily burdened by their wretched physical and mental health, comparative ignorance, and personal agendas.
In modern society, we would not sanctify and glorify someone’s debilitating, chronic diseases, but would treat them. If that person believed life is torment, and that his illnesses are punishment for sin, and, like Luther, his heavy pain is negligible because it is not even a fraction of what Christ suffered on the cross, and “the more you cleanse yourself, the dirtier you get,” we would suggest therapy.
Lacking treatment, if they would even have used it, these men wove their diseases and neuroses into their worldviews, and ultimately into ours. Among all his other pains, Calvin supposedly suffered from trigeminal neuralgia, aka “the suicide disease,” in which an inflamed cranial nerve sends a pain down the head and into the body described by some sufferers as “a searing hot knife ripping through your jaw.” Short of a blow to the head, there was no remedy for Calvin, so it seems natural he would try desperately to make some meaning out of his pain. He decided his pain was part of Yahweh’s Plan (A plan that nobody knows. Mystery!) Sickness was caused by “punishment of human sin, God’s hidden will, the malignancy of Satan and the demons, and the evil will of other human beings…You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.”
Yes, painful illnesses and experiences can season a person’s priorities for the better, maybe stimulate a catharsis. But let’s not get carried away: “Do not believe yourself healthy,” said Augustine. “Immortality is health; this life is a long sickness.” Luther’s belief about the etiology of his physical and psychological pains isn’t something you could code for insurance: “Our bodies are always exposed to Satan. The maladies I suffer are not natural, but Devil's spells.” (Demons and neighbors’ curses were still a lively factor in European belief at that time. They’re not anymore. Lutheranism still is.)
Luther claimed frequently to fight the devil while on the toilet, where he spent inordinate amounts of time, (constipation and hemorrhoids, remember), and on which toilet he both experienced his epiphany of “salvation through grace alone” and wrote most of his 95 Theses. That particular toilet was rediscovered in his old home, in the early 2000s. “Luther's lavatory thrills experts,” trumpeted the BBC, if you can play the trumpet with tongue in cheek. It is on display in the Luther Museum in Wittenberg, no sitting allowed. Discovery potential remains, says Luther expert Dr. Martin Treu: “We still don't know what was used for wiping in those days.”
Next time:
Other directions Christianity could have taken: Medieval Eco-Nuns and the Renaissance