The Dark Ages were especially dark for sex, according to Raymond J. Lawrence in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. Pope Gregory the Great’s (reigned 590-604) vision of sexuality was even more austere than Augustine’s. A protégé of Benedict of Nursia, he condemned the pursuit of sexual pleasure even within the bounds of marriage (“…the pleasure itself can by no means be without sin”). Sex outside marriage warranted eternal damnation. Clergy in the West should be monasticized, he maintained, although it took until the Gregorian Reform of the 11th century for celibacy to be canonically imposed. The Venerable Bede agreed with Gregory that pleasure accompanying procreation was sinful. He maintained that persons should refrain from entering a church until having washed and waited a certain interval of time since intercourse. The “Penitentials,” manuals used for assigning penances during confession, were filled with sexual proscriptions. Sex was intended only for procreation. Even various sexual positions, such as retroposition (man behind woman) and the dorsal position (woman on top), were condemned.
In comparison, Muslim scholars were relatively liberated about sex as opposed to their Christian counterparts. By the second millennium, “the claim that the best people have the least amount of sexual pleasure, was fixed and remained dominant even into modern times, in both Catholic and Protestant cultures.” The Cathars took this obsession with sexual purity to extremes, forbidding intercourse even among married couples. (They denigrated the lax medieval church as ecclesia carnalis, “the church of the flesh.”) Crushed by church authorities, they bequeathed a legacy of spiritual otherworldliness and the notion of romantic love untainted by sexual desire (including the rituals surrounding weddings that persist to this day). The medieval mindset persisted to the time of the Reformation. Thomas More’s hairshirt, worn to quell the concupiscence of the flesh, is a fitting metaphor for the epoch.
Lutheran Guilt 