A Language Older Than Words - Derrick Jensen [46]
Back to Judeo-Christianity, and the relationship between this religion and exploitation. Many of the men who drafted the Bible, and the men who later helped shape the Christian worldview, probably believed, sincerely, that it was their God-given right to rape a woman and their holy duty to silence all women. Don't take my word for this. Let the fathers speak for themselves. Tertullian stated that women were "the devil's gateway," and was in agreement with Ambrose that all evil stems from women. Origen, the father of the Alexandrian church, so hated the flesh that he castrated himself to become, in the words of St. Matthew, one of the "eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven." He stated, "What is seen with the eyes of the creator is masculine, and not feminine, for God does not stoop to look upon what is feminine and of the flesh."
Examples of Christian misogyny are legion: St. Chrysotom said, "What else is woman but a foe to friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectible detriment, an evil of nature;" St. Thomas Aquinas, "The voice of a woman is an invitation to lust, and therefore must not be heard in church." St. Augustine got right to the point: "I know nothing which brings the manly mind down from the heights more than a woman's caresses."
This notion that sexuality and women—in fact the earth and all direct experience—bring men down from what is considered most important—the heights to which manly men may attain— is a central theme of our culture. The denigration of the flesh is essential to science, where a body is considered "nothing but a statue or a machine," and where direct experience is considered "mere anecdotal evidence" or noise to be ignored while we search for the real signal. And of course it is fundamental to Christianity: I recently came across a paragraph in the book Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, which details some of the methods used by early Christians to try to control the erotic. It states: "Ammonius used to burn his body with a red-hot iron every time [he felt sexual desire]. Pachon shut himself in a hyena's den, hoping to die sooner than yield, and then he held an asp against his genital organs. Evagrius spent many nights in a frozen well. Philoromus wore irons. One hermit agreed one night to take in a woman who was lost in the desert. He left his light burning all night and burned his fingers on it to remind himself of eternal punishment. A monk who had treasured the memory of a very beautiful woman, when he heard that she was dead, went and dippled his coat in her decomposed body, and lived with this smell to help him fight his constant thoughts of beauty." Clearly, these men suffered.
It would be comforting, as always, to believe these are the words of a few sad men. We would, as always, be wrong. Origen, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas were influential men. And they articulated—as did Descartes, Bacon, Hitler—deep cultural urges in ways that obviously resonated with a great many people.
Take Martin Luther, who wrote, "I would have such venomous, syphilitic whores broken on the wheel and flayed because one cannot estimate the harm such filthy whores do to young men who are so wretchedly ruined and whose blood is contaminated before they have achieved full manhood." If his message hadn't resonated, would Luther be known as the father of a church? Would any of these men be esteemed, even beatified? No, their words would have been ignored instead of being translated into action.
By the time Luther gave voice to his hatred, in the sixteenth century, women had been getting burned at the stake for nearly seven hundred years, since the council of Salzburg in 799 C.E. approved the torture of witches. Of course the legalized murder of women goes much farther back. Millions of women—up to twenty percent in many communities—were tortured and killed on the pretense that they were witches, and that they had committed crimes against men.
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