Adam and Eve in Fair Verona

I have just finished re-reading the late J. N. D. Kelly’s wonderfully readable biography of Jerome and it made me a bit sad. St. Jerome was, of course, the greatest Christian scholar of his day and he deserves immense credit for soldiering ahead with his translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew when he knew that he would get all kinds of grief for it. But for all his scholarship and brilliance he was hard to like—at least as he survives in history books.  He was famously abusive in his literary opposition to those he considered his foes and quick to take offense, which combines to make a pretty toxic cocktail.  But what made me the most sad was his ferocious opposition to sex.   

Not just “bad” sex outside of marriage but sex per se, even within marriage.  For him, sex within marriage was just barely tolerable.  It beat fornication but only by a slim margin.  For Jerome and his set, sex itself was defiling and was only justified because it could lead to procreation—or best of all, the procreation of those who would renounce sex and stay virginal.  I admit that in our day, when hard core pornography is a multi-billion dollar industry and reaches young boys around the average age of eleven, I am sometimes tempted to agree with Jerome.  But misuse does not negate proper use and Jerome’s disdain for marriage was a bit over the top.

We see this clearly in Jerome’s advice about how a young girl should ideally be raised.  A friend of his in Rome had given birth to girl and wanted to raise her in the religious life—i.e. as something like a nun.  The new mom asked Jerome how best to educate her newborn daughter.  Jerome was delighted to reply. 

In his letter answering her query he said that boys must be kept at a distance from the girl and that her young female companions should have no worldly friends. Feminine adornment in dress, jewelry or cosmetics was completely banned and as she grew she should not dine with her parents in case tasty dishes should whet her appetite—especially her appetite for sex.  When she had grown up she should avoid the baths and never appear in public without her mother or be present at weddings.  No young man must be allowed to smile at her and she must be poorly dressed.  In her reading she must read only the Bible and good orthodox Fathers. She should start by reading the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job and then the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles and then the Old Testament prophets. Only when she was well-grounded in these books could she read the Song of Songs for if she tackled that book too soon she might get the idea that its theme was sex and physical love.  One would like to know how the child in question (whose name was Paula) actually turned out.

       Jerome’s allergy to sex and his exaltation to the skies of virginity were shared by some of his contemporaries like Augustine and Ambrose.  Those like Jovinian who thought that Jerome was going too far in denigrating sex got a pretty rough ride.

       Jerome admits that he himself suffered badly from the sin of lust and his attraction to the eremitic life in the wilderness was meant as an antidote for it.  (He wasn’t in the wilderness for very long—only a couple of years—and mostly spent his time there working on books.)  But I can’t help wondering and would’ve liked to ask him one thing: “Weren’t you ever in love?”

       In his view, Adam and Eve only ever had sex after they fell so that sex—all sex—is irretrievably and badly tainted.  One sees why he recoiled from the notion that an entire Book of the Bible (the Song of Songs) was devoted to glorifying it.  And—significantly—the notion of procreation, so central to Hebrew culture, doesn’t make an appearance there in the Song of Songs.  The relationship of the man and the woman in the Song has everything to do with love, desire, infatuation, and mutual delight and not a thing to do with what celibates like Jerome said was the main purpose of sex—viz. procreation. 

       It needs asking therefore: what if Adam and Eve were found not in paradisal Eden but transplanted in “fair Verona” like Romeo and Juliet?  What if one of the purposes of sex was romantic love and the mutual devotion of two people who loved each other enough to die for the other?

       It’s Biblical, after all: think of the longing with which the lover yearns and calls for its absent beloved and which forms the climax to the Song of Songs, the ache of soul which reaches out to hold and embrace the other: “Make haste, my beloved and be like a gazelle or a young stag upon the mountain of spices!”  This is not about carnality.  This is about love.

       Let’s return to fair Verona for just a moment. What would the fierce Jerome have made of this, Romeo’s enraptured sight of the girl he loved literally more than life itself: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun! It is my lady, O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were!”

       Anyone who has been in love knows that this is not about sex (except maybe Sigmund Freud) but about self-sacrificing love, the self-transcending kenosis of the heart, an adoration in which the self—even the sexual self with its desires—is utterly forgotten.  That is why C. S. Lewis observed that love is the great killer of lust.

       Regarding being in love, Lewis had this to say: “What comes first is simply a delighted pre-occupation with the Beloved—a general, unspecified pre-occupation with her in her totality. A man in this state really hasn’t leisure to think of sex. He is too busy thinking of a person. The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself. He is full of desire, but the desire may not be sexually toned. If you asked him what he wanted, the true reply would often be, ‘To go on thinking of her’” (from his The Four Loves). 

Here you have Romeo and his Juliet.  And—dare I suggest?—Adam in fair Verona, Adam the moment he first laid his eyes upon Eve and cried out in joy, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!”  This is every man who has ever been in love (and every woman too, I suppose. I leave such things to the distaff side.)

       When we leap from Shakespeare to St. Paul the picture is not contradicted.  Naturally St. Paul is concerned more with Christian behaviour than with individual emotional states or psychology.  But he does not share St. Jerome’s apparent horror of sex.  He forbids spouses to unilaterally deny themselves sexually to their partners and says that such conjugal fasting must be mutually consensual and only for a limited period of time after which they must “come together again”. 

Indeed, for St. Paul, each spouse does not even possess authority over his or her own body, but the other partner does. This mutuality in marriage is the other half of hierarchy: each partner gives themselves to the other and is delighted to be “owned” by the other.  Anyone who has ever written love poetry knows this.

For St. Paul, celibacy is “good” (Greek kalos) if one has the charisma of self-control but since most have charismata other than that of self-control, marriage is the norm.  And even when St. Paul commends such celibacy, he commends it not because sex is defiling or shameful but because such singleness allows one more time for prayer.  (Read all about it in 1 Corinthians 7.)  In Ephesians 5 he is even more positive: the love that husband and wife share is a reflection of the love that Christ and the Church share. The union of Adam and Eve is a mysterion pointing to the Lord and His bride.

       We find the same kind of appreciation of marriage in such Fathers as St. John Chrysostom who valued marriage for its unitive function as well as for its procreative power.  Bluntly put, sex united the spouses emotionally and bonded their hearts together even apart from the possibility of pregnancy.  Pregnancy is the usual fruit of such uniting love but not its sole purpose.  If you doubt that, go back to the open window in Verona for a moment:  if Romeo knew that Juliet had fertility issues and could never conceive, do you think he would have loved her any less? 

The Fathers are admittedly a mixed bag—and too big a bag to unpack in a blog post.  (Those interested in the Fathers’ views on sexuality and gender are referred to the invaluable volume Origen’s Revenge by the brilliant Brian Patrick Mitchell, a book whose slimness belies its importance.)

        This, I suggest, is the missing piece in dear Jerome: a heart ravished by love, a love that transcends sexual desire and kills lust dead.  Paul assumed its presence—or at least its potential—when he wrote Ephesians 5.  Its presence is celebrated with flashing lights in the Song of Songs.  It can even be found, if you read carefully enough, in the lives of the Patriarchs.  

One can, if one likes, demean the Patriarchs for being too… well, patriarchal. But then look at how Abimelech king of the Philistines peered through a window and saw Isaac “sporting” with his wife Rebekah (thus the King James Version; literally “laughing” as lovers do, which is why the king knew they were not siblings as they claimed).  And look at Jacob working for Laban for seven years so that he could marry his daughter Rachel and how the time “seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her” (Genesis 26:8, 29:20). Apparently fair Verona could even be found in the ancient Near East. 

That is because such love is, as God intended, universal, to be found in primordial Eden, and fair Verona, in ancient Palestine, and even in Jerome’s threatened Mediterranean Roman universe.  It was part of God’s plan for mankind when He made them male and female. It retains its shiny glory even in the midst of this fallen world.